Cibrarp  of ID  he  'theological  ^eminar^ 

PRINCETON  •  NEW  JERSEY 


»vyy  //a 
sss  Vxv* 

PRESENTED  BY 

Rudolf  A.  Clemen 


PR  400*1 
.  L_33)2, 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


https://archive.org/details/danceoflife00elli_1 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


THE  DANCE  OF  L 


HAVELOCK  ELLIS 


AUTHOR  OF  “IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS,”  “  AFFIRMATIONS1’ 
“ESSAYS  IN  WAR-TIME,”  ETC. 


BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 

HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 
GTfje  |3r e&s  Cnmfcritsc 


COPYRIGHT,  1923,  BY  HAVELOCK  ELLIS 


ALL  RIGHTS  RESERVED 


SECOND  IMPRESSION,  JUNE,  I923 
THIRD  IMPRESSION,  AUGUST,  I923 
FOURTH  IMPRESSION,  SEPTEMBER,  I923 
FIFTH  IMPRESSION,  OCTOBER,  1923 
SIXTH  IMPRESSION,  NOVEMBER,  I923 
SEVENTH  IMPRESSION,  DECEMBER,  1923 
EIGHTH  IMPRESSION,  FEBRUARY,  I924 
NINTH  IMPRESSION,  JULY,  1924 
TENTH  IMPRESSION,  SEPTEMBER,  I924 
ELEVENTH  IMPRESSION,  OCTOBER,  I924 
TWELFTH  IMPRESSION,  DECEMBER,  I924 
THIRTEENTH  IMPRESSION,  DECEMBER,  I924 
FOURTEENTH  IMPRESSION,  APRIL,  I925 


tEfje  ^tbersstlic  |3teg£( 
CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED  IN  THE  U.S.A. 


PREFACE 


This  book  was  planned  many  years  ago.  As  to  the 
idea  running  through  it,  I  cannot  say  when  that  arose. 
My  feeling  is,  it  was  born  with  me.  On  reflection,  in¬ 
deed,  it  seems  possible  the  seeds  fell  imperceptibly  in 
youth  —  from  F.  A.  Lange,  maybe,  and  other  sources 
—  to  germinate  unseen  in  a  congenial  soil.  However 
that  may  be,  the  idea  underlies  much  that  I  have  writ¬ 
ten.  Even  the  present  book  began  to  be  written,  and  to 
be  published  in  a  preliminary  form,  more  than  fifteen 
years  ago.  Perhaps  I  may  be  allowed  to  seek  consola¬ 
tion  for  my  slowness,  however  vainly,  in  the  saying  of 
Rodin  that  “slowness  is  beauty,”  and  certainly  it  is 
the  slowest  dances  that  have  been  to  me  most  beauti¬ 
ful  to  see,  while,  in  the  dance  of  life,  the  achievement  of 
a  civilisation  in  beauty  seems  to  be  inversely  to  the 
rapidity  of  its  pace. 

Moreover,  the  book  remains  incomplete,  not  merely 
in  the  sense  that  I  would  desire  still  to  be  changing  and 
adding  to  each  chapter,  but  even  incomplete  by  the  ab¬ 
sence  of  many  chapters  for  which  I  had  gathered  mate¬ 
rial,  and  twenty  years  ago  should  have  been  surprised 
to  find  missing.  For  there  are  many  arts,  not  among 
those  we  conventionally  call  “fine,”  which  seem  to  me 
fundamental  for  living.  But  now  I  put  forth  the  book 


vi  PREFACE 

as  it  stands,  deliberately,  without  remorse,  well  content 
so  to  do. 

Once  that  would  not  have  been  possible.  A  book 
must  be  completed  as  it  had  been  originally  planned, 
finished,  rounded,  polished.  As  a  man  grows  older  his 
ideals  change.  Thoroughness  is  often  an  admirable 
ideal.  But  it  is  an  ideal  to  be  adopted  with  discrimina¬ 
tion,  having  due  reference  to  the  nature  of  the  work  in 
hand.  An  artist,  it  seems  to  me  now,  has  not  always  to 
finish  his  work  in  every  detail ;  by  not  doing  so  he  may 
succeed  in  making  the  spectator  his  co-worker,  and  put 
into  his  hands  the  tool  to  carry  on  the  work  which,  as  it 
lies  before  him,  beneath  its  veil  of  yet  partly  unworked 
material,  still  stretches  into  infinity.  Where  there  is 
most  labour  there  is  not  always  most  life,  and  by  doing 
less,  provided  only  he  has  known  how  to  do  well,  the 
artist  may  achieve  more. 

He  will  not,  I  hope,  achieve  complete  consistency. 
In  fact  a  part  of  the  method  of  such  a  book  as  this, 
written  over  a  long  period  of  years,  is  to  reveal  a  con¬ 
tinual  slight  inconsistency.  That  is  not  an  evil,  but 
rather  the  avoidance  of  an  evil.  We  cannot  remain  con¬ 
sistent  with  the  world  save  by  growing  inconsistent 
with  our  own  past  selves.  The  man  who  consistently 
—  as  he  fondly  supposes  ‘  ‘  logically  ’  ’  —  clings  to  an  un¬ 
changing  opinion  is  suspended  from  a  hook  which  has 
ceased  to  exist.  “  I  thought  it  was  she,  and  she  thought 
it  was  me,  and  when  we  come  near  it  were  n’t  neither 
one  of  us”  —  that  metaphysical  statement  holds,  with 


PREFACE 


•t 

VII 

a  touch  of  exaggeration,  a  truth  we  must  always  bear  in 
mind  concerning  the  relation  of  subject  and  object. 
They  can  neither  of  them  possess  consistency;  they 
have  both  changed  before  they  come  up  with  one  an¬ 
other.  Not  that  such  inconsistency  is  a  random  flux  or 
a  shallow  opportunism.  We  change,  and  the  world 
changes,  in  accordance  with  the  underlying  organisa¬ 
tion,  and  inconsistency,  so  conditioned  by  truth  to  the 
whole,  becomes  the  higher  consistency  of  life.  I  am 
therefore  able  to  recognise  and  accept  the  fact  that, 
again  and  again  in  this  book,  I  have  come  up  against 
what,  superficially  regarded,  seemed  to  be  the  same 
fact,  and  each  time  have  brought  back  a  slightly  differ¬ 
ent  report,  for  it  had  changed  and  I  had  changed.  The 
world  is  various,  of  infinite  iridescent  aspect,  and  until 
I  attain  to  a  correspondingly  infinite  variety  of  state¬ 
ment  I  remain  far  from  anything  that  could  in  any 
sense  be  described  as  “truth.”  We  only  see  a  great 
opal  that  never  looks  the  same  this  time  as  when  we 
looked  last  time.  “He  never  painted  to-day  quite  the 
same  as  he  had  painted  yesterday,”  £lie  Faure  says 
of  Renoir,  and  it  seems  to  me  natural  and  right  that  it 
should  have  been  so.  I  have  never  seen  the  same  world 
twice.  That,  indeed,  is  but  to  repeat  the  Heraclitean 
saying  —  an  imperfect  saying,  for  it  is  only  the  half  of 
the  larger,  more  modern  synthesis  I  have  already 
quoted  —  that  no  man  bathes  twice  in  the  same 
stream.  Yet  —  and  this  opposing  fact  is  fully  as  signifi¬ 
cant  —  we  really  have  to  accept  a  continuous  stream 


PREFACE 


viil 

as  constituted  in  our  minds ;  it  flows  in  the  same  direc¬ 
tion  ;  it  coheres  in  what  is  more  or  less  the  same  shape. 
Much  the  same  may  be  said  of  the  ever-changing 
bather  whom  the  stream  receives.  So  that,  after  all, 
there  is  not  only  variety,  but  also  unity.  The  diversity 
of  the  Many  is  balanced  by  the  stability  of  the  One. 
That  is  why  life  must  always  be  a  dance,  for  that  is 
what  a  dance  is:  perpetual  slightly  varied  movements 
which  are  yet  always  held  true  to  the  shape  of  the 
whole. 

We  verge  on  philosophy.  The  whole  of  this  book  is 
on  the  threshold  of  philosophy.  I  hasten  to  add  that  it 
remains  there.  No  dogmas  are  here  set  forth  to  claim 
any  general  validity.  Not  that  even  the  technical  phi¬ 
losopher  always  cares  to  make  that  claim.  Mr.  F.  H. 
Bradley,  one  of  the  most  influential  of  modern  English 
philosophers,  who  wrote  at  the  outset  of  his  career, 
“On  all  questions,  if  you  push  me  far  enough,  at  pres¬ 
ent  I  end  in  doubts  and  perplexities,”  still  says,  forty 
years  later,  that  if  asked  to  define  his  principles  rigidly, 
“  I  become  puzzled.”  For  even  a  cheese-mite,  one  imag¬ 
ines,  could  only  with  difficulty  attain  an  adequate 
metaphysical  conception  of  a  cheese,  and  how  much 
more  difficult  the  task  is  for  Man,  whose  everyday  in¬ 
telligence  seems  to  move  on  a  plane  so  much  like  that 
of  a  cheese-mite  and  yet  has  so  vastly  more  complex  a 
web  of  phenomena  to  synthetise. 

It  is  clear  how  hesitant  and  tentative  must  be  the 
attitude  of  one  who,  having  found  his  life-work  else- 


PREFACE 


lx 


where  than  in  the  field  of  technical  philosoph}^  may  in¬ 
cidentally  feel  the  need,  even  if  only  playfully,  to  spec¬ 
ulate  concerning  his  function  and  place  in  the  universe. 
Such  speculation  is  merely  the  instinctive  impulse  of 
the  ordinary  person  to  seek  the  wider  implications 
bound  up  with  his  own  little  activities.  It  is  philosophy 
only  in  the  simple  sense  in  which  the  Greeks  understood 
philosophy,  merely  a  philosophy  of  life,  of  one’s  own 
life,  in  the  wide  world.  The  technical  philosopher  does 
something  quite  different  when  he  passes  over  the 
threshold  and  shuts  himself  up  in  his  study — 

“Veux-tu  decouvrir  le  monde, 

Ferme  tes  yeux,  Rosemonde” — 

and  emerges  with  great  tomes  that  are  hard  to  buy,  hard 
to  read,  and,  let  us  be  sure,  hard  to  write.  But  of  Socra¬ 
tes,  as  of  the  English  philosopher  Falstaff,  we  are  not 
told  that  he  wrote  anything. 

So  that  if  it  may  seem  to  some  that  this  book  reveals 
the  expansive  influence  of  that  great  classico-mathe- 
matical  Renaissance  in  which  it  is  our  high  privilege  to 
live,  and  that  they  find  here  “relativity”  applied  to 
life,  I  am  not  so  sure.  It  sometimes  seems  to  me  that, 
in  the  first  place,  we,  the  common  herd,  mould  the 
great  movements  of  our  age,  and  only  in  the  second 
place  do  they  mould  us.  I  think  it  was  so  even  in  the 
great  earlier  classico-mathematical  Renaissance.  We 
associate  it  with  Descartes.  But  Descartes  could  have 
effected  nothing  if  an  innumerable  crowd  in  many  fields 
had  not  created  the  atmosphere  by  which  he  was  en- 


X 


PREFACE 


abled  to  breathe  the  breath  of  life.  We  may  here  profit* 
ably  bear  in  mind  all  that  Spengler  has  shown  concern¬ 
ing  the  unity  of  spirit  underlying  the  most  diverse  ele¬ 
ments  in  an  age’s  productivity.  Roger  Bacon  had  in 
him  the  genius  to  create  such  a  Renaissance  three  cen¬ 
turies  earlier;  there  was  no  atmosphere  for  him  to  live 
in  and  he  was  stifled.  But  Malherbe,  who  worshipped 
Number  and  Measure  as  devoutly  as  Descartes,  was 
bom  half  a  century  before  him.  That  silent,  colossal, 
ferocious  Norman  —  vividly  brought  before  us  by 
Tallement  des  R6aux,  to  whom,  rather  than  to  Saint- 
Simon,  we  owe  the  real  picture  of  seventeenth-century 
France  —  was  possessed  by  the  genius  of  destruction, 
for  he  had  the  natural  instinct  of  the  Viking,  and  he 
swept  all  the  lovely  Romantic  spirit  of  old  France  so 
completely  away  that  it  has  scarcely  ever  revived  since 
until  the  days  of  Verlaine.  But  he  had  the  Norman 
classico-mathematical  architectonic  spirit  —  he  might 
have  said,  like  Descartes,  as  truly  as  it  ever  can  be  said 
in  literature,  Omnia  apud  me  mathematica  fiunt  —  and 
he  introduced  into  the  world  a  new  rule  of  Order. 
Given  a  Malherbe,  a  Descartes  could  hardly  fail  to 
follow,  a  French  Academy  must  come  into  existence 
almost  at  the  same  time  as  the  “Discours  de  la  M6- 
thode,”  and  Le  Notre  must  already  be  drawing  the  geo¬ 
metrical  designs  of  the  gardens  of  Versailles.  Descartes, 
it  should  be  remembered,  could  not  have  worked  with¬ 
out  support;  he  was  a  man  of  timid  and  yielding  char¬ 
acter,  though  he  had  once  been  a  soldier,  not  of  the 


PREFACE 


xl 

heroic  temper  of  Roger  Bacon.  If  Descartes  could  have 
been  put  back  into  Roger  Bacon’s  place,  he  would  have 
thought  many  of  Bacon’s  thoughts.  But  we  should 
never  have  known  it.  He  nervously  burnt  one  of  his 
works  when  he  heard  of  Galileo’s  condemnation,  and  it 
was  fortunate  that  the  Church  was  slow  to  recognise 
how  terrible  a  Bolshevist  had  entered  the  spiritual 
world  with  this  man,  and  never  realised  that  his  books 
must  be  placed  on  the  Index  until  he  was  already 
dead. 

So  it  is  to-day.  We,  too,  witness  a  classico-mathemat- 
ical  Renaissance.  It  is  bringing  us  a  new  vision  of  the 
universe,  but  also  a  new  vision  of  human  life.  That  is 
why  it  is  necessary  to  insist  upon  life  as  a  dance.  This 
is  not  a  mere  metaphor.  The  dance  is  the  rule  of  num¬ 
ber  and  of  rhythm  and  of  measure  and  of  order,  of  the 
controlling  influence  of  form,  of  the  subordination  of 
the  parts  to  the  whole.  That  is  what  a  dance  is.  And 
these  same  properties  also  make  up  the  classic  spirit, 
not  only  in  life,  but,  still  more  clearly  and  definitely,  in 
the  universe  itself.  We  are  strictly  correct  when  we  re¬ 
gard  not  only  life  but  the  universe  as  a  dance.  For  the 
universe  is  made  up  of  a  certain  number  of  elements, 
less  than  a  hundred,  and  the  “periodic  law’’  of  these 
elements  is  metrical.  They  are  ranged,  that  is  to  say, 
not  haphazard,  not  in  groups,  but  by  number,  and 
those  of  like  quality  appear  at  fixed  and  regular  inter¬ 
vals.  Thus  our  world  is,  even  fundamentally,  a  dance, 
a  single  metrical  stanza  in  a  poem  which  will  be  for  ever 


PREFACE 


«• 

Xll 

hidden  from  us,  except  in  so  far  as  the  philosophers, 
who  are  to-day  even  here  applying  the  methods  of 
mathematics,  may  believe  that  they  have  imparted  to 
it  the  character  of  objective  knowledge. 

I  call  this  movement  of  to-day,  as  that  of  the  seven¬ 
teenth  century,  classico-mathematical.  And  I  regard 
the  dance  (without  prejudice  to  a  distinction  made 
later  in  this  volume)  as  essentially  its  symbol.  This  is 
not  to  belittle  the  Romantic  elements  of  the  world, 
which  are  equally  of  its  essence.  But  the  vast  exuber¬ 
ant  energies  and  immeasurable  possibilities  of  the  first 
day  may  perhaps  be  best  estimated  when  we  have 
reached  their  final  outcome  on  the  sixth  day  of  crea¬ 
tion. 

However  that  may  be,  the  analogy  of  the  two  his¬ 
torical  periods  in  question  remains,  and  I  believe  that 
we  may  consider  it  holds  good  to  the  extent  that  the 
strictly  mathematical  elements  of  the  later  period  are 
not  the  earliest  to  appear,  but  that  we  are  in  the  pres¬ 
ence  of  a  process  that  has  been  in  subtle  movement  in 
many  fields  for  half  a  century.  If  it  is  significant  that 
Descartes  appeared  a  few  years  after  Malherbe,  it  is 
equally  significant  that  Einstein  was  immediately  pre¬ 
ceded  by  the  Russian  ballet.  We  gaze  in  admiration 
at  the  artist  who  sits  at  the  organ,  but  we  have  been 
blowing  the  bellows;  and  the  great  performer's  music 
would  have  been  inaudible  had  it  not  been  for  us. 

This  is  the  spirit  in  which  I  have  written.  We  are 
all  engaged  —  not  merely  one  or  two  prominent  per* 


PREFACE 


xiii 


sons  here  and  there  —  in  creating  the  spiritual  world. 
I  have  never  written  but  with  the  thought  that  the 
reader,  even  though  he  may  not  know  it,  is  already  on 
my  side.  Only  so  could  I  write  with  that  sincerity 
and  simplicity  without  which  it  would  not  seem  to  me 
worth  while  to  write  at  all.  That  may  be  seen  in  the 
saying  which  I  set  on  the  forefront  of  my  earliest  book, 
“  The  New  Spirit  ” :  he  who  carries  farthest  his  most  in¬ 
timate  feelings  is  simply  the  first  in  file  of  a  great  num¬ 
ber  of  other  men,  and  one  becomes  typical  by  being  to 
the  utmost  degree  one’s  self.  That  saying  I  chose  with 
much  deliberation  and  complete  conviction  because  it 
went  to  the  root  of  my  book.  On  the  surface  it  obvi¬ 
ously  referred  to  the  great  figures  I  was  there  concerned 
with,  representing  what  I  regarded  —  by  no  means  in 
the  poor  sense  of  mere  modernity  —  as  the  New  Spirit 
in  life.  They  had  all  gone  to  the  depths  of  their  own 
souls  and  thence  brought  to  the  surface  and  expressed 
audaciously  or  beautifully,  pungently  or  poignantly 
—  intimate  impulses  and  emotions  which,  shocking  as 
they  may  have  seemed  at  the  time,  are  now  seen  to  be 
those  of  an  innumerable  company  of  their  fellow  men 
and  women.  But  it  was  also  a  book  of  personal  affirma¬ 
tions.  Beneath  the  obvious  meaning  of  that  motto  on 
the  title-page  lay  the  more  private  meaning  that  I  was 
myself  setting  forth  secret  impulses  which  might  some 
day  be  found  to  express  the  emotions  also  of  others.  In 
the  thirty-five  years  that  have  since  passed,  the  saying 
has  often  recurred  to  my  mind,  and  if  I  have  sought  in 


xiv  PREFACE 

vain  to  make  it  mine  I  find  no  adeauate  justification 
for  the  work  of  my  life. 

And  now,  as  I  said  at  the  outset,  I  am  even  prepared 
to  think  that  that  is  the  function  of  all  books  that  are 
real  books.  There  are  other  classes  of  so-called  books: 
there  is  the  class  of  history  books  and  the  class  of  foren¬ 
sic  books,  that  is  to  say,  the  books  of  facts  and  the 
books  of  argument.  No  one  would  wish  to  belittle 
either  kind.  But  when  we  think  of  a  book  proper,  in 
the  sense  that  a  Bible  means  a  book,  we  mean  more 
than  this.  We  mean,  that  is  to  say,  a  revelation  of 
something  that  had  remained  latent,  unconscious,  per¬ 
haps  even  more  or  less  intentionally  repressed,  within 
the  writer’s  own  soul,  which  is,  ultimately,  the  soul  of 
mankind.  These  books  are  apt  to  repel;  nothing,  in¬ 
deed,  is  so  likely  to  shock  us  at  first  as  the  manifest  rev¬ 
elation  of  ourselves.  Therefore,  such  books  may  have 
to  knock  again  and  again  at  the  closed  door  of  our 
hearts.  “Who  is  there?”  we  carelessly  cry,  and  we 
cannot  open  the  door;  we  bid  the  importunate  stranger, 
whatever  he  may  be,  to  go  away;  until,  as  in  the  apo¬ 
logue  of  the  Persian  mystic,  at  last  we  seem  to  hear  the 
voice  outside  saying:  “It  is  thyself.” 


H.  E. 


CONTENTS 


I.  Introduction 

i 

II.  The  Art  of  Dancing 

36 

III.  The  Art  of  Thinking 

68 

IV.  The  Art  of  Writing 

141 

V.  The  Art  of  Religion 

191 

VI.  The  Art  of  Morals 

244 

VII.  Conclusion 

285 

Index 


359 


I 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

•  • 

CHAPTER  I 

INTRODUCTION 

I 

It  has  always  been  difficult  for  Man  to  realise  that  his 
life  is  all  an  art.  It  has  been  more  difficult  to  conceive 
it  so  than  to  act  it  so.  For  that  is  always  how  he  has 
more  or  less  acted  it.  At  the  beginning,  indeed,  the 
primitive  philosopher  whose  business  it  was  to  account 
for  the  origin  of  things  usually  came  to  the  conclusion 
that  the  whole  universe  was  a  work  of  art,  created  b}r 
some  Supreme  Artist,  in  the  way  of  artists,  out  of  ma¬ 
terial  that  was  practically  nothing,  even  out  of  his  own 
excretions,  a  method  which,  as  children  sometimes  in¬ 
stinctively  feel,  is  a  kind  of  creative  art.  The  most 
familiar  to  us  of  these  primitive  philosophical  state¬ 
ments  —  and  really  a  statement  that  is  as  typical  as 
any  —  is  that  of  the  Hebrews  in  the  first  chapter  of 
their  Book  of  Genesis.  We  read  there  how  the  whole 
cosmos  was  fashioned  out  of  nothing,  in  a  measurable 
period  of  time  by  the  art  of  one  Jehovah,  who  pro¬ 
ceeded  methodically  by  first  forming  it  in  the  rough, 
and  gradually  working  in  the  details,  the  finest  and 
most  delicate  last,  just  as  a  sculptor  might  fashion  a 


2 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


statue.  We  may  find  many  statements  of  the  like  kind 
even  as  far  away  as  the  Pacific.1  And  —  also  even  at 
the  same  distance  —  the  artist  and  the  craftsman,  who 
resembled  the  divine  creator  of  the  world  by  making 
the  most  beautiful  and  useful  things  for  Mankind, 
himself  also  partook  of  the  same  divine  nature.  Thus, 
in  Samoa,  as  also  in  Tonga,  the  carpenter,  who  built 
canoes,  occupied  a  high  and  almost  sacred  position,  ap¬ 
proaching  that  of  the  priest.  Even  among  ourselves, 
with  our  Roman  traditions,  the  name  Pontiff,  or  Bridge- 
Builder,  remains  that  of  an  imposing  and  hieratic  per¬ 
sonage. 

But  that  is  only  the  primitive  view  of  the  world. 
When  Man  developed,  when  he  became  more  scientific 
and  more  moralistic,  however  much  his  practice  re¬ 
mained  essentially  that  of  the  artist,  his  conception  be¬ 
came  much  less  so.  He  was  learning  to  discover  the 
mystery  of  measurement;  he  was  approaching  the  be¬ 
ginnings  of  geometry  and  mathematics;  he  was  at  the 
same  time  becoming  warlike.  So  he  saw  things  in 
straight  lines,  more  rigidly;  he  formulated  laws  and 
commandments.  It  was,  Einstein  assures  us,  the  right 
way.  But  it  was,  at  all  events  in  the  first  place,  most 
unfavourable  to  the  view  of  life  as  an  art.  It  remains 
so  even  to-day. 

Yet  there  are  always  some  who,  deliberately  or  by 
instinct,  have  perceived  the  immense  significance  in 

1  See,  for  instance,  Turner’s  Samoa,  chap.  I.  Usually,  however,  in  the 
Pacific,  creation  was  accomplished,  in  a  more  genuinely  evolutionary 
manner,  by  a  long  series  of  progressive  generations. 


INTRODUCTION 


3 

lite  of  the  conception  of  art.  That  is  especially  so  as  re¬ 
gards  the  finest  thinkers  of  the  two  countries  which, 
so  far  as  we  may  divine,  —  however  difficult  it  may  here 
be  to  speak  positively  and  by  demonstration,  —  have 
had  the  finest  civilisations,  China  and  Greece.  The 
wisest  and  most  recognisably  greatest  practical  phi¬ 
losophers  of  both  these  lands  have  believed  that  the 
whole  of  life,  even  government,  is  an  art  of  definitely 
like  kind  with  the  other  arts,  such  as  that  of  music  or 
the  dance.  We  may,  for  instance,  recall  to  memory  one 
of  the  most  typical  of  Greeks.  Of  Protagoras,  calum¬ 
niated  by  Plato,  —  though,  it  is  interesting  to  observe 
that  Plato's  own  transcendental  doctrine  of  Ideas  has 
been  regarded  as  an  effort  to  escape  from  the  solvent 
influence  of  Protagoras’  logic,  —  it  is  possible  for  the 
modern  historian  of  philosophy  to  say  that  “the  great¬ 
ness  of  this  man  can  scarcely  be  measured."  It  was 
with  measurement  that  his  most  famous  saying  was 
concerned:  “Man  is  the  measure  of  all  things,  of  those 
which  exist  and  of  those  which  have  no  existence."  It 
was  by  his  insistence  on  Man  as  the  active  creator  of 
life  and  knowledge,  the  artist  of  the  world,  moulding  it 
to  his  own  measure,  that  Protagoras  is  interesting  to 
us  to-day.  He  recognised  that  there  are  no  absolute 
criteria  by  which  to  judge  actions.  He  was  the  father 
of  relativism  and  of  phenomenalism,  probably  the  ini¬ 
tiator  of  the  modern  doctrine  that  the  definitions  of 
geometry  are  only  approximately  true  abstractions 
from  empirical  experiences.  We  need  not,  and  prof> 


4 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


ably  should  not,  suppose  that  in  undermining  dogma¬ 
tism  he  was  setting  up  an  individual  subjectivism.  It 
was  the  function  of  Man  in  the  world,  rather  than  of 
the  individual,  that  he  had  in  mind  when  he  enunci¬ 
ated  his  great  principle,  and  it  was  with  the  reduction 
of  human  activity  and  conduct  to  art  that  he  was 
mainly  concerned.  His  projects  for  the  art  of  living  be¬ 
gan  with  speech,  and  he  was  a  pioneer  in  the  arts  of 
language,  the  initiator  of  modern  grammar.  He  wrote 
treatises  on  many  special  arts,  as  well  as  the  general 
treatise  “On  the  Art”  among  the  pseudo-Hippocratic 
writings,  —  if  we  may  with  Gomperz  attribute  it  to 
him,  —  which  embodies  the  spirit  of  modern  positive 
science. 1 

Hippias,  the  philosopher  of  Elis,  a  contemporary  of 
Protagoras,  and  like  him  commonly  classed  among  the 
“Sophists,”  cultivated  the  largest  ideal  of  life  as  an  art 
which  embraced  all  arts,  common  to  all  mankind  as  a 
fellowship  of  brothers,  and  at  one  with  natural  law 
which  transcends  the  convention  of  human  laws. 
Plato  made  fun  of  him,  and  that  was  not  hard  to  do,  for 
a  philosopher  who  conceived  the  art  of  living  as  so 
large  could  not  possibly  at  every  point  adequately  play 
at  it.  But  at  this  distance  it  is  his  ideal  that  mainly 
concerns  us,  and  he  really  was  highly  accomplished, 
even  a  pioneer,  in  many  of  the  multifarious  activities 
he  undertook.  Pie  was  a  remarkable  mathematician; 
he  was  an  astronomer  and  geometer;  he  was  a  copious 
1  Gomperz,  Greek  Thinkers ,  voL  I,  book  in,  chap.  Vi. 


INTRODUCTION  5 

poet  in  the  most  diverse  modes,  and,  moreover,  wrote 
on  phonetics,  rhythm,  music,  and  mnemonics;  he  dis¬ 
cussed  the  theories  of  sculpture  and  painting;  he  was 
both  mythologist  and  ethnologist,  as  well  as  a  student 
of  chronology;  he  had  mastered  many  of  the  artis¬ 
tic  crafts.  On  one  occasion,  it  is  said,  he  appeared  at 
the  Olympic  gathering  in  garments  which,  from  the 
sandals  on  his  feet  to  the  girdle  round  his  waist  and  the 
rings  on  his  fingers,  had  been  made  by  his  own  hands. 
Such  a  being  of  kaleidoscopic  versatility,  Gomperz  re¬ 
marks,  we  call  contemptuously  a  Jack-of-all-trades. 
We  believe  in  subordinating  a  man  to  his  work.  But 
other  ages  have  judged  differently.  The  fellow  citizens 
of  Hippias  thought  him  worthy  to  be  their  ambassador 
to  the  Peloponnesus.  In  another  age  of  immense  human 
activity,  the  Renaissance,  the  vast-ranging  energies  of 
Leo  Alberti  were  honoured,  and  in  yet  a  later  like  age, 
Diderot — Pantophile  as  Voltaire  called  him — displayed 
a  like  fiery  energy  of  wide-ranging  interests,  although 
it  was  no  longer  possible  to  attain  the  same  level  of 
wide-ranging  accomplishment.  Of  course  the  work  of 
Hippias  was  of  unequal  value,  but  some  of  it  was  of 
firm  quality  and  he  shrank  from  no  labour.  He  seems 
to  have  possessed  a  gracious  modesty,  quite  unlike  the 
conceited  pomposity  Plato  was  pleased  to  attribute  to 
him.  He  attached  more  importance  than  was  common 
among  the  Greeks  to  devotion  to  truth,  and  he  was 
cosmopolitan  in  spirit.  He  was  famous  for  his  distinc¬ 
tion  between  Convention  and  Nature,  and  Plato  put 


6 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


into  his  mouth  the  words:  44  All  of  you  who  are  here 
present  I  reckon  to  be  kinsmen  and  friends  and  fel¬ 
low  citizens,  and  by  nature,  not  by  law;  for  by  nature 
like  is  akin  to  like,  whereas  law  is  the  tyrant  of  man¬ 
kind,  and  often  compels  us  to  do  many  things  that  are 
against  nature/’  Hippias  was  in  the  line  of  those  whose 
supreme  ideal  is  totality  of  existence.  Ulysses,  as 
Benn  remarks,  was  in  Greek  myth  the  representative 
of  the  ideal,  and  its  supreme  representative  in  real 
life  has  in  modern  times  been  Goethe.1 

n 

But,  in  actual  fact,  is  life  essentially  an  art?  Let  us 
look  at  the  matter  more  closely,  and  see  what  life  is 
like,  as  people  have  lived  it.  This  is  the  more  necessary 
to  do  since,  to-day  at  all  events,  there  are  simple- 
minded  people  —  well-meaning  honest  people  whom 
we  should  not  ignore  —  who  pooh-pooh  such  an  idea. 
They  point  to  the  eccentric  individuals  in  our  Western 
civilisation  who  make  a  little  idol  they  call  “  Art,”  and 
fall  down  and  worship  it,  sing  incomprehensible  chants 
in  its  honour,  and  spend  most  of  their  time  in  pouring 

1  I  have  here  mainly  followed  Gomperz  ( Greek  Thinkers ,  vol.  i,  pp.  430- 
34);  there  is  not  now,  however,  much  controversy  over  the  position  of 
Hippias,  which  there  is  now,  indeed,  rather  a  tendency  to  exaggerate, 
considering  how  small  is  the  basis  of  knowledge  we  possess.  Thus  Dupreel 
(La  Legende  Socratique ,  p.  432),  regarding  him  as  the  most  misunderstood 
of  the  great  Sophists,  declares  that  Hippias  is  “the  thinker  who  con¬ 
ceived  the  universality  of  science,  just  as  Prodicus  caught  glimpses  of  the 
synthesis  of  the  social  sciences.  Hippias  is  the  philosopher  of  science,  the 
Great  Logician,  just  as  Prodicus  is  the  Great  Moralist.”  He  compares 
him  to  Pico  della  Mirandola  as  a  Humanist  and  to  Leibnitz  in  power  of 
wide  synthesis. 


INTRODUCTION 


7 


contempt  on  the  people  who  refuse  to  recognise  that 
this  worship  of  “Art”  is  the  one  thing  needed  for  what 
they  may  or  may  not  call  the  “  moral  uplift  ”  of  the  age 
they  live  in.  We  must  avoid  the  error  of  the  good 
simple-minded  folk  in  whose  eyes  these  “Arty”  people 
loom  so  large.  They  are  not  large,  they  are  merely  the 
morbid  symptoms  of  a  social  disease;  they  are  the 
fantastic  reaction  of  a  society  which  as  a  whole  has 
ceased  to  move  along  the  true  course  of  any  real  and 
living  art.  For  that  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  ec¬ 
centricities  of  a  small  religious  sect  worshipping  in  a 
Little  Bethel ;  it  is  the  large  movement  of  the  common 
life  of  a  community,  indeed  simply  the  outward  and 
visible  form  of  that  life. 

Thus  the  whole  conception  of  art  has  been  so  nar¬ 
rowed  and  so  debased  among  us  that,  on  the  one  hand, 
the  use  of  the  word  in  its  large  and  natural  sense  seems 
either  unintelligible  or  eccentric,  while,  on  the  other 
hand,  even  if  accepted,  it  still  remains  so  unfamiliar 
that  its  immense  significance  for  our  whole  vision  of 
life  in  the  world  is  scarcely  at  first  seen.  This  is  not 
altogether  due  to  our  natural  obtusity,  or  to  the 
absence  of  a  due  elimination  of  subnormal  stocks 
among  us,  however  much  we  may  be  pleased  to  attrib¬ 
ute  to  that  dysgenic  factor.  It  seems  largely  inevitable. 
That  is  to  say  that,  so  far  as  we  in  our  modern  civilisa¬ 
tion  are  concerned,  it  is  the  outcome  of  the  social 
process  of  two  thousand  years,  the  result  of  the  break¬ 
up  of  the  classic  tradition  of  thought  into  various  parts 


8 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


which  under  post-classic  influences  have  been  pursued 
separately.1  Religion  or  the  desire  for  the  salvation  of 
our  souls,  “Art”  or  the  desire  for  beautification, 
Science  or  the  search  for  the  reasons  of  things  — 
these  conations  of  the  mind,  which  are  really  three 
aspects  of  the  same  profound  impulse,  have  been 
allowed  to  furrow  each  its  own  narrow  separate 
channel,  in  alienation  from  the  others,  and  so  they 
have  all  been  impeded  in  their  greater  function  of 
fertilising  life. 

It  is  interesting  to  observe,  I  may  note  in  passing, 
how  totally  new  an  aspect  a  phenomenon  may  take  on 
when  transformed  from  some  other  channel  into  that 
of  art.  We  may  take,  for  instance,  that  remarkable 
phenomenon  called  Napoleon,  as  impressive  an  in¬ 
dividualistic  manifestation  as  we  could  well  find  in 
human  history  during  recent  centuries,  and  consider 
two  contemporary,  almost  simultaneous,  estimates  of 
it.  A  distinguished  English  writer,  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells,  in 
a  notable  and  even  famous  book,  his  “Outline  of 
History,”  sets  down  a  judgment  of  Napoleon  through¬ 
out  a  whole  chapter.  Now  Mr.  Wells  moves  in  the 
ethico-religious  channel.  He  wakes  up  every  morning, 
it  is  said,  with  a  rule  for  the  guidance  of  life ;  some  of  his 

1  Strictly  speaking,  in  the  technical  sense  of  that  much-abused  word, 
this  is  “decadence.”  (I  refer  to  the  sense  in  which  I  defined  “decadence ” 
many  years  ago  in  Affirmations ,  pp.  175-87.)  So  that  while  the  minor 
arts  have  sometimes  been  classic  and  sometimes  decadent,  the  major  art 
of  living  during  the  last  two  thousand  years,  although  one  can  think  of 
great  men  who  have  maintained  the  larger  classic  ideal,  has  mainly  been 
decadent. 


INTRODUCTION 


9 

critics  say  that  it  is  every  morning  a  new  rule,  and 
others  that  the  rule  is  neither  ethical  nor  religious;  but 
we  are  here  concerned  only  with  the  channel  and  not 
with  the  direction  of  the  stream.  In  the  “Outline” 
Mr.  Wells  pronounces  his  ethico-religious  anathema  of 
Napoleon,  “this  dark  little  archaic  personage,  hard, 
compact,  capable,  unscrupulous,  imitative,  and  neatly 
vulgar.”  The  “archaic”  —  the  old-fashioned,  out¬ 
worn  —  element  attributed  to  Napoleon,  is  accentu¬ 
ated  again  later,  for  Mr.  Wells  has  an  extremely  low 
opinion  (hardly  justifiable,  one  may  remark  in  passing) 
of  primitive  man.  Napoleon  was  “a  reminder  of 
ancient  evils,  a  thing  like  the  bacterium  of  some 
pestilence”;  “the  figure  he  makes  in  history  is  one  of 
almost  incredible  self-conceit,  of  vanity,  greed,  and 
cunning,  of  callous  contempt  and  disregard  of  all 
who  trusted  him.”  There  is  no  figure,  Mr.  Wells 
asserts,  so  completely  antithetical  to  the  figure  of 
Jesus  of  Nazareth.  He  was  “a  scoundrel,  bright  and 
complete.” 

There  is  no  occasion  to  question  this  condemnation 
when  we  place  ourselves  in  the  channel  along  which 
Mr.  Wells  moves;  it  is  probably  inevitable;  we  may 
even  accept  it  heartily.  Yet,  however  right  along  that 
line,  that  is  not  the  only  line  in  which  we  may  move. 
Moreover  —  and  this  is  the  point  which  concerns  us  — 
it  is  possible  to  enter  a  sphere  in  which  no  such  merely 
negative,  condemnatory,  and  dissatisfying  a  conclusion 
need  be  reached.  For  obviously  it  is  dissatisfying.  It  is 


IO 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


not  finally  acceptable  that  so  supreme  a  protagonist 
of  humanity,  acclaimed  by  millions,  of  whom  many 
gladly  died  for  him,  and  still  occupying  so  large  and 
glorious  a  place  in  the  human  imagination,  should  be 
dismissed  in  the  end  as  merely  an  unmitigated  scoun¬ 
drel.  For  so  to  condemn  him  is  to  condemn  Man  who 
made  him  what  he  was.  He  must  have  answered  some 
lyric  cry  in  the  human  heart.  That  other  sphere  in 
which  Napoleon  wears  a  different  aspect  is  the  sphere 
of  art  in  the  larger  and  fundamental  sense.  Elie 
Faure,  a  French  critic,  an  excellent  historian  of  art  in 
the  ordinary  sense,  is  able  also  to  grasp  art  in  the 
larger  sense  because  he  is  not  only  a  man  of  letters  but 
of  science,  a  man  with  medical  training  and  experience, 
who  has  lived  in  the  open  world,  not,  as  the  critic  of 
literature  and  art  so  often  appears  to  be,  a  man  living 
in  a  damp  cellar.  Just  after  Wells  issued  his  “Out- 
line,”  Elie  Faure,  who  probably  knew  nothing  about  it 
since  he  reads  no  English,  published  a  book  on  Napo¬ 
leon  which  some  may  consider  the  most  remarkable 
book  on  that  subject  they  have  ever  come  across.  For 
to  Faure  Napoleon  is  a  great  lyric  artist. 

It  is  hard  not  to  believe  that  Faure  had  Wells’s 
chapter  on  Napoleon  open  before  him,  he  speaks  so 
much  to  the  point.  He  entitled  the  first  chapter  of  his 
“Napol6on”  “Jesus  and  He,”  and  at  once  pierces  to 
what  Wells,  too,  had  perceived  to  be  the  core  of  the 
matter  in  hand:  “From  the  point  of  view  of  morality 
he  is  not  to  be  defended  and  is  even  incomprehensible 


INTRODUCTION 


ii 


In  fact  be  violates  law,  he  kills,  he  sows  vengeance  and 
death.  But  also  he  dictates  law,  he  tracks  and  crushes 
crime,  he  establishes  order  everywhere.  He  is  an 
assassin.  He  is  also  a  judge.  In  the  ranks  he  would 
deserve  the  rope.  At  the  summit  he  is  pure,  distribut¬ 
ing  recompense  and  punishment  with  a  firm  hand.  He 
is  a  monster  with  two  faces,  like  all  of  us  perhaps,  in 
any  case  like  God,  for  those  who  have  praised  Napo¬ 
leon  and  those  who  have  blamed  him  have  alike  not 
understood  that  the  Devil  is  the  other  face  of  God.” 
From  the  moral  point  of  view,  Faure  says  (just  as 
Wells  had  said),  Napoleon  is  Antichrist.  But  from 
this  standpoint  of  art,  all  grows  clear.  He  is  a  poet  of 
action,  as  Jesus  was,  and  like  him  he  stands  apart. 
These  two,  and  these  two  alone  among  the  world’s 
supremely  great  men  of  whom  we  have  any  definite 
knowledge,  “acted  out  their  dream  instead  of  dream¬ 
ing  their  action.”  It  is  possible  that  Napoleon  himself 
was  able  to  estimate  the  moral  value  of  that  acted 
dream.  As  he  once  stood  before  the  grave  of  Rousseau, 
he  observed:  “  It  would  have  been  better  for  the  repose 
of  France  if  that  man  and  I  had  never  existed.”  Yet 
we  cannot  be  sure.  “  Is  not  repose  the  death  of  the 
world?”  asks  Faure.  “Had  not  Rousseau  and  Napo¬ 
leon  precisely  the  mission  of  troubling  that  repose? 
In  another  of  the  profound  and  almost  impersonal 
sayings  that  sometimes  fell  from  his  lips,  Napoleon  ob¬ 
served  with  a  still  deeper  intuition  of  his  own  function 
in  the  world:  “  I  love  power.  But  it  is  as  an  artist  that 


12 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


I  love  it.  I  love  it  as  a  musician  loves  his  violin,  to 
draw  out  of  it  sounds  and  chords  and  harmonies.  1 
love  it  as  an  artist.”  As  an  artist!  These  words  were 
the  inspiration  of  this  finely  illuminating  study  of 
Napoleon,  which,  while  free  from  all  desire  to  defend  or 
admire,  yet  seems  to  explain  Napoleon,  in  the  larger 
sense  to  justify  his  right  to  a  place  in  the  human  story, 
*0  imparting  a  final  satisfaction  which  Wells,  we 
^eel,  could  he  have  escaped  from  the  bonds  of  the 
narrow  conception  of  life  that  bound  him,  had  in 
him  the  spirit  and  the  intelligence  also  to  bestow 
upon  us. 

But  it  is  time  to  turn  from  this  aside.  It  is  always 
possible  to  dispute  about  individuals,  even  when  so 
happy  an  illustration  chances  to  come  before  us.  We 
are  not  here  concerned  with  exceptional  persons,  but 
with  the  interpretation  of  general  and  normal  human 
civilisations. 


Ill 

I  take,  almost  at  random,  the  example  of  a  primitive 
people.  There  are  many  others  that  would  do  as  well 
or  better.  But  this  happens  to  come  to  hand,  and  it 
has  the  advantage  not  only  of  being  a  primitive  people, 
but  one  living  on  an  island,  so  possessing  until  lately 
its  own  little-impaired  indigenous  culture,  as  far  as 
possible  remote  in  space  from  our  own ;  the  record  also 
has  been  made,  as  carefully  and  as  impartially  as  one 
can  well  expect,  by  a  missionary’s  wife  who  speaks  from 


INTRODUCTION 


n 

a  knowledge  covering  over  twenty  years.1  It  is  almost 
needless  to  add  that  she  is  as  little  concerned  with  any 
theory  of  the  art  of  life  as  the  people  she  is  describing. 

The  Loyalty  Islands  lie  to  the  east  of  New  Cale¬ 
donia,  and  have  belonged  to  France  for  more  than  half 
a  century.  They  are  thus  situated  in  much  the  same 
latitude  as  Egypt  is  in  the  Northern  hemisphere,  but 
with  a  climate  tempered  by  the  ocean.  It  is  with  the 
Island  of  Lifu  that  we  are  mainly  concerned.  There 
are  no  streams  or  mountains  in  this  island,  though  a 
ridge  of  high  rocks  with  large  and  beautiful  caves  con¬ 
tains  stalactites  and  stalagmites  and  deep  pools  of 
fresh  water;  these  pools,  before  the  coming  of  the 
Christians,  were  the  abode  of  the  spirits  of  the  de¬ 
parted,  and  therefore  greatly  reverenced.  A  dying  man 
would  say  to  his  friends:  “  I  will  meet  you  all  again  in 
the  caves  where  the  stalactites  are.” 

The  Loyalty  Islanders,  who  are  of  average  European 
stature,  are  a  handsome  race,  except  for  their  thick  lips 
and  dilated  nostrils,  which,  however,  are  much  less 
pronounced  than  among  African  negroes.  They  have 
soft  large  brown  eyes,  wavy  black  hair,  white  teeth, 
and  rich  brown  skin  of  varying  depth.  Each  tribe  has 
its  own  well-defined  territory  and  its  own  chief.  Al- 

1  Emma  Hadfield,  Among  the  Natives  of  the  Loyalty  Group.  1920.  It 
would  no  doubt  have  been  more  satisfactory  to  select  a  people  like  the 
Fijians  rather  than  the  Lifuans,  for  they  represented  a  more  robust  and 
accomplished  form  of  a  rather  similar  culture,  but  their  culture  has  re¬ 
ceded  into  the  past, —  and  the  same  may  be  said  of  the  Marquesans  of 
whom  Melville  left,  in  Typee ,  a  famous  and  delightful  picture  which 
other  records  confirm,  —  while  that  of  the  Lifuans  is  still  recent. 


H 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


though  possessing  high  moral  qualities,  they  are  a 
laughter-loving  people,  and  neither  their  climate  nor 
their  mode  of  life  demands  prolonged  hard  labour,  but 
they  can  work  as  well  as  the  average  Briton,  if  need  be, 
for  several  consecutive  days,  and,  when  the  need  is 
over,  lounge  or  ramble,  sleep  or  talk.  The  basis  of  their 
culture  —  and  that  is  doubtless  the  significant  fact  for 
us  —  is  artistic.  Every  one  learned  music,  dancing, 
and  song.  Therefore  it  is  natural  for  them  to  regard 
rhythm  and  grace  in  all  the  actions  of  life,  and  almost 
a  matter  of  instinct  to  cultivate  beauty  in  all  social 
relationships.  Men  and  boys  spent  much  time  in 
tattooing  and  polishing  their  brown  skins,  in  dyeing 
and  dressing  their  long  wavy  hair  (golden  locks,  as 
much  admired  as  they  always  have  been  in  Europe, 
being  obtained  by  the  use  of  lime),  and  in  anointing 
their  bodies.  These  occupations  were,  of  course,  con¬ 
fined  to  the  men,  for  man  is  naturally  the  ornamental 
sex  and  woman  the  useful  sex.  The  women  gave  no 
attention  to  their  hair,  except  to  keep  it  short.  It  was 
the  men  also  who  used  oils  and  perfumes,  not  the 
women,  who,  however,  wore  bracelets  above  the  elbow 
and  beautiful  long  strings  of  jade  beads.  No  clothing 
is  worn  until  the  age  of  twenty-five  or  thirty,  and  then 
all  dress  alike,  except  that  chiefs  fasten  the  girdle  dif¬ 
ferently  and  wear  more  elaborate  ornaments.  These 
people  have  sweet  and  musical  voices  and  they  culti¬ 
vate  them.  They  are  good  at  learning  languages  and 
they  are  great  orators.  The  Lifuan  language  is  soft  and 


INTRODUCTION 


liquid,  one  word  running  into  another  pleasantly  to 
the  ear,  and  it  is  so  expressive  that  one  may  sometimes 
understand  the  meaning  by  the  sound.  In  one  of  these 
islands,  Uvea,  so  great  is  the  eloquence  of  the  people 
that  they  employ  oratory  to  catch  fish,  whom  indeed 
they  regard  in  their  legends  as  half  human,  and  it  is 
believed  that  a  shoal  of  fish,  when  thus  politely  plied 
with  compliments  from  a  canoe,  will  eventually,  and 
quite  spontaneously,  beach  themselves  spellbound. 

For  a  primitive  people  the  art  of  life  is  necessarily  of 
large  part  concerned  with  eating.  It  is  recognised  that 
no  one  can  go  hungry  when  his  neighbour  has  food,  so 
no  one  was  called  upon  to  make  any  great  demonstra¬ 
tion  of  gratitude  on  receiving  a  gift.  Help  rendered  to 
another  was  help  to  one’s  self,  if  it  contributed  to  the 
common  weal,  and  what  I  do  for  you  to-day  you  will  do 
for  me  to-morrow.  There  was  implicit  trust,  and  goods 
were  left  about  without  fear  of  theft,  which  was  rare 
and  punishable  by  death.  It  was  not  theft,  however,  if, 
when  the  owner  was  looking,  one  took  an  article  one 
wanted.  To  tell  a  lie,  also,  with  intent  to  deceive,  was 
a  serious  offence,  though  to  tell  a  lie  when  one  was 
afraid  to  speak  the  truth  was  excusable.  The  Lifuans 
are  fond  of  food,  but  much  etiquette  is  practised  in 
eating.  The  food  must  be  conveyed  to  the  mouth 
gracefully,  daintily,  leisurely.  Every  one  helped  him¬ 
self  to  the  food  immediately  in  front  of  him,  without 
hurry,  without  reaching  out  for  dainty  morsels  (which 
were  often  offered  to  women),  for  every  one  looked 


l6 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


after  his  neighbour,  and  every  one  naturally  felt  that 
he  was  his  brother’s  keeper.  So  it  was  usual  to  invite 
passers-by  cordially  to  share  in  the  repast.  “  In  the 
matter  of  food  and  eating,”  Mrs.  Hadfield  adds,  “they 
might  put  many  of  our  countrymen  to  shame.”  Not 
only  must  one  never  eat  quickly,  or  notice  dainties 
that  are  not  near  one,  but  it  would  be  indelicate  to  eat 
in  the  presence  of  people  who  are  not  themselves  eat¬ 
ing.  One  must  always  share,  however  small  one’s  por¬ 
tion,  and  one  must  do  so  pleasantly;  one  must  accept 
also  what  is  offered,  but  slowly,  reluctantly;  having 
accepted  it,  you  may,  if  you  like,  openly  pass  it  on  to 
some  one  else.  In  old  days  the  Lifuans  were,  occasion¬ 
ally,  cannibals,  not,  it  would  seem,  either  from  neces¬ 
sity  or  any  ritual  reason,  but  because,  like  some  peoples 
elsewhere,  they  liked  it,  having,  indeed,  at  times,  a 
kind  of  craving  for  animal  food.  If  a  man  had  twenty 
or  thirty  wives  and  a  large  family,  it  would  be  quite 
correct  if,  now  and  then,  he  cooked  one  of  his  own  chil¬ 
dren,  although  presumably  he  might  prefer  that  some 
one  else’s  child  was  chosen.  The  child  would  be  cooked 
whole,  wrapped  in  banana  or  coconut  leaves.  The 
social  inconveniences  of  this  practice  have  now  been 
recognised.  But  they  still  feel  the  utmost  respect  and 
reverence  for  the  dead  and  fail  to  find  anything  offen¬ 
sive  or  repulsive  in  a  corpse.  “Why  should  there  be, 
seeing  it  was  once  our  food?”  Nor  have  they  any  fear 
of  death.  To  vermin  they  seem  to  have  little  objec¬ 
tion,  but  otherwise  they  have  a  strong  love  of  cleanli- 


INTRODUCTION 


17 


ness.  The  idea  of  using  manure  in  agricultural  opera¬ 
tions  seems  to  them  disgusting,  and  they  never  do  use 
it.  “The  sea  was  the  public  playground.”  Mothers 
take  their  little  ones  for  sea-baths  long  before  they 
can  walk,  and  small  children  learn  to  swim  as  they 
learn  to  walk,  without  teaching.  With  their  reverence 
for  death  is  associated  a  reverence  for  old  age.  “Old 
age  is  a  term  of  respect,  and  every  one  is  pleased  to  be 
taken  for  older  than  he  is  since  old  age  is  honoured.” 
Still,  regard  for  others  was  general  —  not  confined  to 
the  aged.  In  the  church  nowadays  the  lepers  are  seated 
on  a  separate  bench,  and  when  the  bench  is  occupied 
by  a  leper  healthy  women  will  sometimes  insist  on 
sitting  with  him;  they  could  not  bear  to  see  the  old 
man  sitting  alone  as  though  he  had  no  friends.  There 
was  much  demonstration  on  meeting  friends  after 
absence.  A  Lifuan  always  said  “Olea”  (“Thank 
you”)  for  any  good  news,  though  not  affecting  him 
personally,  as  though  it  were  a  gift,  for  he  was  glad  to 
be  able  to  rejoice  with  another.  Being  divided  into 
small  tribes,  each  with  its  own  autocratic  chief,  war 
was  sometimes  inevitable.  It  was  attended  by  much 
etiquette,  which  was  always  strictly  observed.  The 
Lifuans  were  not  acquainted  with  the  civilised  custom 
of  making  rules  for  warfare  and  breaking  them  when 
war  actually  broke  out.  Several  days’  notice  must  be 
given  before  hostilities  were  commenced.  Women  and 
children,  in  contrast  to  the  practice  of  civilised  warfare, 
were  never  molested.  As  soon  as  half  a  dozen  fighters 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


i3 

were  put  out  of  action  on  one  side,  the  chief  of  that 
side  would  give  the  command  to  cease  fighting  and  the 
war  was  over.  An  indemnity  was  then  paid  by  the 
conquerors  to  the  vanquished,  and  not,  as  among 
civilised  peoples,  by  the  vanquished  to  the  conquerors. 
It  was  felt  to  be  the  conquered  rather  than  the  con¬ 
queror  who  needed  consolation,  and  it  also  seemed 
desirable  to  show  that  no  feeling  of  animosity  was  left 
behind.  This  was  not  only  a  delicate  mark  of  consider¬ 
ation  to  the  vanquished,  but  also  very  good  policy,  as, 
by  neglecting  it,  some  Europeans  may  have  had  cause 
to  learn.  This  whole  Lifuan  art  of  living  has,  however, 
been  undermined  by  the  arrival  of  Christianity  with 
its  usual  accompaniments.  The  Lifuans  are  substitut¬ 
ing  European  vices  for  their  own  virtues.  Their  sim¬ 
plicity  and  confidence  are  passing  away,  though,  even 
yet,  Mrs.  Hadfield  says,  they  are  conspicuous  for  their 
honesty,  truthfulness,  good-humour,  kindness,  and  po¬ 
liteness,  remaining  a  manly  and  intelligent  people. 

IV 

The  Lifuans  furnish  an  illustration  which  seems  de¬ 
cisive.  But  they  are  savages,  and  on  that  account  their 
example  may  be  invalidated.  It  is  well  to  take  another 
illustration  from  a  people  whose  high  and  long-con¬ 
tinued  civilisation  is  now  undisputed.' 

The  civilisation  of  China  is  ancient:  that  has  long 
been  a  familiar  fact.  But  for  more  than  a  thousand 
years  it  was  merely  a  legend  to  Western  Europeans: 


INTRODUCTION 


19 

none  had  ever  reached  China,  or,  if  they  had,  they  had 
never  returned  to  tell  the  tale;  there  were  too  many 
fierce  and  jealous  barbarians  between  the  East  and  the 
West.  It  was  not  until  the  end  of  the  thirteenth  cen¬ 
tury,  in  the  pages  of  Marco  Polo,  the  Venetian  Co¬ 
lumbus  of  the  East,  —  for  it  was  an  Italian  who  dis¬ 
covered  the  Old  World  as  well  as  the  New,  —  that 
China  at  last  took  definite  shape  alike  as  a  concrete 
fact  and  a  marvellous  dream.  Later,  Italian  and 
Portuguese  travellers  described  it,  and  it  is  interesting 
to  note  what  they  had  to  say.  Thus  Perera  in  the  six¬ 
teenth  century,  in  a  narrative  which ^Willes  translated 
for  Hakluyt’s  “  Voyages,”  presents  a  detailed  picture 
of  Chinese  life  with  an  admiration  all  the  more  im¬ 
pressive  since  we  cannot  help  feeling  how  alien  that 
civilisation  was  to  the  Catholic  traveller  and  how 
many  troubles  he  had  himself  to  encounter.  He  is 
astonished,  not  only  by  the  splendour  of  the  lives  of 
the  Chinese  on  the  material  side,  alike  in  large  things 
and  in  small,  but  by  their  fine  manners  in  all  the  ordi¬ 
nary  course  of  life,  the  courtesy  in  which  they  seemed 
to  him  to  exceed  all  other  nations,  and  in  the  fair  deal¬ 
ing  which  far  surpassed  that  of  all  other  Gentiles  and 
Moors,  while  in  the  exercise  of  justice  he  found  them 
superior  even  to  many  Christians,  for  they  do  justice 
to  unknown  strangers,  which  in  Christendom  is  rare; 
moreover,  there  were  hospitals  in  every  city  and  no 
beggars  were  ever  to  be  seen.  It  was  a  vision  of  splen¬ 
dour  and  delicacy  and  humanity,  which  he  might  have 


20 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


seen,  here  and  there,  in  the  courts  of  princes  in  Europe, 
but  nowhere  in  the  West  on  so  vast  a  scale  as  in  China. 

The  picture  which  Marco  Polo,  the  first  European  to 
reach  China  (at  all  events  in  what  we  may  call  modern 
times),  presented  in  the  thirteenth  century  was  yet 
more  impressive,  and  that  need  not  surprise  us,  for 
when  he  saw  China  it  was  still  in  its  great  Augustan 
age  of  the  Sung  Dynasty.  He  represents  the  city  of 
Hang-Chau  as  the  most  beautiful  and  sumptuous  in 
the  world,  and  we  must  remember  that  he  himself 
belonged  to  Venice,  soon  to  be  known  as  the  most 
beautiful  and  sumptuous  city  of  Europe,  and  had 
acquired  no  small  knowledge  of  the  world.  As  he 
describes  its  life,  so  exquisite  and  refined  in  its  civilisa¬ 
tion,  so  humane,  so  peaceful,  so  joyous,  so  well  ordered, 
so  happily  shared  by  the  whole  population,  we  realise 
that  here  had  been  reached  the  highest  point  of  urban 
civilisation  to  which  Man  has  ever  attained.  Marco 
Polo  can  think  of  no  word  to  apply  to  it  —  and  that 
again  and  again  —  but  Paradise. 

The  China  of  to-day  seems  less  strange  and  aston¬ 
ishing  to  the  Westerner.  It  may  even  seem  akin  to 
him  —  partly  through  its  decline,  partly  through  his 
own  progress  in  civilisation  —  by  virtue  of  its  direct 
and  practical  character.  That  is  the  conclusion  of  a 
sensitive  and  thoughtful  traveller  in  India  and  Japan 
and  China,  G.  Lowes  Dickinson.  He  is  impressed  by 
the  friendliness,  the  profound  humanity,  the  gaiety, 
of  the  Chinese,  by  the  unequalled  self-respect,  in- 


INTRODUCTION 


21 


I  * 


dependence,  and  courtesy  of  the  common  people. 
“The  fundamental  attitude  of  the  Chinese  towards 
life  is,  and  has  always  been,  that  of  the  most  modern 
West,  nearer  to  us  now  than  to  our  mediaeval  an¬ 
cestors,  infinitely  nearer  to  us  than  India.”1 

So  far  it  may  seem  scarcely  as  artists  that  these 
travellers  regard  the  Chinese.  They  insist  on  their 
cheerful,  practical,  social,  good-mannered,  tolerant, 
peaceable,  humane  way  of  regarding  life,  on  the  re¬ 
markably  educable  spirit  in  which  they  are  willing,  and 
easily  able,  to  change  even  ancient  and  deep-rooted 
habits  when  it  seems  convenient  and  beneficial  to  do 
so;  they  are  willing  to  take  the  world  lightly,  and  seem 
devoid  of  those  obstinate  conservative  instincts  by 
which  we  are  guided  in  Europe.  The  “Resident  in 
Peking”  says  they  are  the  least  romantic  of  peoples. 
He  says  it  with  a  nuance  of  dispraise,  but  Lowes  Dick¬ 
inson  says  precisely  the  same  thing  about  Chinese 
poetry,  and  with  no  such  nuance:  “  It  is  of  all  poetry  I 
know  the  most  human  and  the  least  symbolic  or  ro¬ 
mantic.  It  contemplates  life  just  as  it  presents  itself, 
without  any  veil  of  ideas,  any  rhetoric  or  sentiment;  it 
simply  clears  away  the  obstruction  which  habit  has 

1  G.  Lowes  Dickinson,  An  Essay  on  the  Civilisations  of  India ,  China, 

and  Japan  (1914),  p.  47.  No  doubt  there  are  shades  to  be  added  to  this 
picture.  They  may  be  found  in  a  book,  published  two  years  earlier,  China 
as  it  Really  Is,  by  “a  Resident  in  Peking  ”  who  claims  to  have  been  born 
in  China.  Chinese  culture  has  receded,  in  part  swamped  by  over-popula¬ 
tion,  and  concerning  a  land  where  to-day,  it  has  lately  been  said,  “  magni¬ 
ficence,  crudity,  delicacy,  fetidity,  and  fragrance  are  blended,”  it  is  easy 
for  Westerners  to  show  violent  difference  of  opinion. 


22 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


built  up  between  us  and  the  beauty  of  things  and 
leaves  that,  showing  in  its  own  nature. ”  Every  one 
who  has  learnt  to  enjoy  Chinese  poetry  will  appreciate 
the  delicate  precision  of  this  comment.  The  quality  of 
their  poetry  seems  to  fall  into  line  with  the  simple, 
direct,  childlike  quality  which  all  observers  note  in  the 
Chinese  themselves.  The  unsympathetic  “Resident 
in  Peking”  describes  the  well-known  etiquette  of 
politeness  in  China:  “A  Chinaman  will  inquire  of  what 
noble  country  you  are.  You  return  the  question,  and 
he  will  say  his  lowly  province  is  so-and-so.  He  will 
invite  you  to  do  him  the  honour  of  directing  your 
jewelled  feet  to  his  degraded  house.  You  reply  that 
you,  a  discredited  worm,  will  crawl  into  his  magnificent 
palace.”  Life  becomes  all  play.  Ceremony  —  the 
Chinese  are  unequalled  for  ceremony,  and  a  Govern¬ 
ment  Department,  the  Board  of  Rites  and  Ceremonies, 
exists  to  administer  it  —  is  nothing  but  more  or  less 
crystallised  play.  Not  only  is  ceremony  here  “almost 
an  instinct,”  but,  it  has  been  said,  “A  Chinese  thinks 
in  theatrical  terms.”  We  are  coming  near  to  the 
sphere  of  art. 

The  quality  of  play  in  the  Chinese  character  and 
Chinese  civilisation  has  impressed  alike  them  who  have 
seen  China  from  afar  and  by  actual  contact.  It  used  to 
be  said  that  the  Chinese  had  invented  gunpowder  long 
before  Europeans  and  done  nothing  with  it  but  make 
hreworks.  That  seemed  to  the  whole  Western  world  a 
terrible  blindness  to  the  valuable  uses  of  gunpowder, 


INTRODUCTION 


*3 


and  it  is  only  of  late  years  that  a  European  com¬ 
mentator  has  ventured  to  remark  that  “the  proper  use 
of  gunpowder  is  obviously  to  make  fireworks,  which 
may  be  very  beautiful  things,  not  to  kill  men.”  Cer¬ 
tainly  the  Chinese,  at  all  events,  appreciate  to  the  full 
this  proper  use  of  gunpowder.  “One  of  the  most 
obvious  characteristics  of  the  Chinese  is  their  love  of 
fireworks,”  we  are  told.  The  gravest  people  and  the 
most  intellectual  occupy  themselves  with  fireworks, 
and  if  the  works  of  Bergson,  in  which  pyro technical 
allusions  are  so  frequent,  are  ever  translated  into 
Chinese,  one  can  well  believe  that  China  will  produce 
enthusiastic  Bergsonians.  All  toys  are  popular;  every¬ 
body,  it  is  said,  buys  toys  of  one  sort  or  another:  paper 
windmills,  rattles,  Chinese  lanterns,  and  of  course 
kites,  which  have  an  almost  sacred  significance.  They 
delight,  also,  in  more  complicated  games  of  skill,  in¬ 
cluding  an  elaborate  form  of  chess,  far  more  difficult 
than  ours.1  It  is  unnecessary  to  add  that  to  philoso¬ 
phy,  a  higher  and  more  refined  form  of  play,  the  Chinese 
are  peculiarly  addicted,  and  philosophic  discussion  is 
naturally  woven  in  with  an  “art  of  exquisite  enjoy¬ 
ment”  —  carried  probably  to  greater  perfection  than 
anywhere  else  in  the  world.  Bertrand  Russell,  who 
makes  this  remark,  in  the  suggestive  comments  on  his 

1  See,  for  instance,  the  chapter  on  games  in  Professor  E.  H.  Parker’s 
China:  Past  and  Present.  Reference  may  be  made  to  the  same  author’s 
important  and  impartial  larger  work,  China:  Its  History ,  with  a  dis¬ 
criminating  chapter  on  Chinese  personal  characteristics.  Perhaps,  ths 
most  penetrating  study  of  Chinese  psychology  is,  however,  Arthur  H. 
Smith's  Chinese  Characteristics. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


24 

own  visit  to  China,  observes  how  this  simple,  child-* 
like,  yet  profound  attitude  towards  life  results  in  a 
liberation  of  the  impulses  to  play  and  enjoyment 
which  “makes  Chinese  life  unbelievably  restful  and 
delightful  after  the  solemn  cruelties  of  the  West.” 
We  are  reminded  of  Gourmont’s  remark  that  “pleas¬ 
ure  is  a  human  creation,  a  delicate  art,  to  which,  as  for 
music  or  painting,  only  a  few  are  apt.” 

The  social  polity  which  brings  together  the  people 
who  thus  view  life  is  at  once  singular  and  appropriate. 
I  well  remember  how  in  youth  a  new  volume  of  the 
Sacred  Books  of  the  East  Series,  a  part  of  the  Con- 
fucian  Li-ki,  came  into  my  hands  and  how  delighted  1 
was  to  learn  that  in  China  life  was  regulated  by  music 
and  ceremony.  That  was  the  beginning  of  an  interest 
in  China  that  has  not  ceased  to  grow,  though  now, 
when  it  has  become  a  sort  of  fashion  to  exalt  the 
spiritual  qualities  of  the  Chinese  above  those  of  other 
peoples,  one  may  well  feel  disinclined  to  admit  any 
interest  in  China.  But  the  conception  itself,  since  it 
seems  to  have  had  its  beginning  at  least  a  thousand 
years  before  Christ,  may  properly  be  considered  inde¬ 
pendently  of  our  Western  fashions.  It  is  Propriety  — 
the  whole  ceremony  of  life  —  in  which  all  harmonious 
intercourse  subsists;  it  is  “the  channel  by  which  we 
apprehend  the  ways  of  Heaven,”  in  no  supernatural 
sense,  for  it  is  on  the  earth  and  not  in  the  skies  that  the 
Confucian  Heaven  lies  concealed.  But  if  human  feel¬ 
ings,  the  instincts  —  for  in  this  matter  the  ancient 


INTRODUCTION 


23 

Chinese  were  at  one  with  our  modern  psychologists,  — 
are  the  field  that  has  to  be  cultivated,  and  it  is  cere¬ 
mony  that  ploughs  it,  and  the  seeds  of  right  action 
that  are  to  be  planted  on  it,  and  discipline  that  is  to 
weed  it,  and  love  that  is  to  gather  in  the  fruits,  it  is  in 
music,  and  the  joy  and  peace  that  accompany  music, 
that  it  all  ends.  Indeed,  it  is  also  in  music  that  it  all 
begins.  For  the  sphere  in  which  ceremonies  act  is 
Man’s  external  life;  his  internal  life  is  the  sphere  of 
music.  It  is  music  that  moulds  the  manners  and  cus¬ 
toms  that  are  comprised  under  ceremony,  for  Con¬ 
fucius  held  that  there  can  be  music  without  sound 
where  “  virtue  is  deep  and  silent  ” ;  and  we  are  reminded 
of  the  “Crescendo  of  Silences”  on  the  Chinese  pa¬ 
vilion  in  Villiers  de  F Isle  Adam’s  story,  “Le  Secret  de 
l’ancienne  Musique.”  It  is  music  that  regulates  the 
heart  and  mind  and  with  that  development  brings 
joy,  and  joy  brings  repose.  And  so  “Man  became 
Heaven.”  “Let  ceremonies  and  music  have  their 
course  until  the  earth  is  filled  with  them!” 

It  is  sometimes  said  that  among  Chinese  moralists 
and  philosophers  Lao-tze,  the  deepest  of  them  alb 
alone  stands  aside  from  the  chorus  in  praise  of  music 
and  ceremony.  When  once  Confucius  came  to  consult 
Lao-tze  concerning  the  rules  of  propriety,  and  rever¬ 
ence  for  the  teaching  of  the  sages  of  antiquity,  we  are 
told,  Lao-tze  replied:  “The  men  of  whom  you  speak, 
sir,  have,  if  you  please,  together  with  their  bones, 
mouldered.”  Confucius  went  away,  puzzled  if  not  dis* 


26 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


satisfied.  He  was  willing  to  work  not  only  from  within 
outwards,  but  from  without  inwards,  because  he  al¬ 
lowed  so  large  a  place  for  social  solidity,  for  tradition¬ 
alism,  for  paternalism,  though  he  recognised  that 
ceremony  is  subordinate  in  the  scheme  of  life,  as  colour 
is  in  a  painting,  the  picture  being  the  real  thing.  Lao- 
tze  was  an  individualist  and  a  mystic.  He  was  little 
concerned  with  moralities  in  the  ordinary  sense.  He 
recognised  no  action  but  from  within  outwards.  But 
though  Confucius  could  scarcely  have  altogether 
grasped  his  conception,  he  was  quite  able  to  grasp  that 
of  Confucius,  and  his  indifference  to  tradition,  to  rule 
and  propriety  was  simply  an  insistence  on  essential 
reality,  on  “music.”  “Ceremonies,”  he  said,  “are  the 
outward  expression  of  inward  feeling.”  He  was  no 
more  opposed  to  the  fundamental  Chinese  conception 
than  George  Fox  was  opposed  to  Christianity  in  refus¬ 
ing  to  observe  the  mere  forms  2nd  ceremonies  of  the 
Church.  A  sound  Confucianism  is  the  outward  mani¬ 
festation  of  Taoism  (as  Lao-tze  himself  taught  it),  just 
as  a  sound  socialism  is  the  outward  manifestation  of  a 
genuine  individualism.  It  has  been  well  said  that 
Chinese  socialistic  solidarity  rests  on  an  individualistic 
basis,  it  is  not  a  bureaucratic  State  socialism ;  it  works 
from  within  outward.  (One  of  the  first  European 
visitors  to  China  remarked  that  there  a  street  was  like 
a  home.)  This  is  well  shown  by  so  great  and  typical  a 
Chinese  philosopher  as  Meh-ti,1  who  lived  shortly 

1  His  ideas  have  been  studied  by  Madame  Alexandra  David,  Le 
lasophe  Meh-U  et  I’IdSe  de  SoUdariU .  London,  1907. 


INTRODUCTION  r? 

after  Confucius,  in  the  fifth  century  b.c.  He  taught 
universal  love,  with  universal  equality,  and  for  him  to 
love  meant  to  act.  He  admitted  an  element  of  self- 
interest  as  a  motive  for  such  an  attitude.  He  desired  to 
universalise  mutual  self-help.  Following  Confucius, 
but  yet  several  centuries  before  Jesus,  he  declared  that 
a  man  should  love  his  neighbour,  his  fellow  man,  as 
himself.  “When  he  sees  his  fellow  hungry,  he  feeds 
him;  when  he  sees  him  cold,  he  clothes  him;  ill,  he 
nurses  him;  dead,  he  buries  him.”  This,  he  said,  was 
by  no  means  opposed  to  filial  piety;  for  if  one  cares  for 
the  parents  of  others,  they  in  turn  will  care  for  his. 
But,  it  was  brought  against  him,  the  power  of  egoism? 
The  Master  agreed.  Yet,  he  said,  Man  accepts  more 
difficult  things.  He  can  renounce  joy,  life  itself,  for 
even  absurd  and  ridiculous  ends.  A  single  generation, 
he  added,  such  is  the  power  of  imitation,  might  suffice 
to  change  a  people’s  customs.  But  Meh-ti  remained 
placid.  He  remarked  that  the  great  ones  of  the  earth 
were  against  human  solidarity  and  equality;  he  left  it 
at  that.  He  took  no  refuge  in  mysticism.  Practical 
social  action  was  the  sole  end  he  had  in  view,  and  we 
have  to  remember  that  his  ideals  are  largely  embodied 
in  Chinese  institutions.1 

We  may  understand  now  how  it  is  that  in  China, 
and  in  China  alone  among  the  great  surviving  civilisa¬ 
tions,  we  find  that  art  animates  the  whole  of  life,  even 
its  morality.  “This  universal  presence  of  art,”  remarks 

1  Eugene  Simon,  La  CiU  Chimnst, 


28 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


an  acute  yet  discriminating  observer,  Emile  Hovelaque, 
whom  I  have  already  quoted,1  “manifested  in  the 
smallest  utensil,  the  humblest  stalls,  the  notices  on  the 
shops,  the  handwriting,  the  rhythm  of  movement, 
always  regular  and  measured,  as  though  to  the  tune  of 
unheard  music,  announces  a  civilisation  which  is  com¬ 
plete  in  itself,  elaborated  in  the  smallest  detail,  pene¬ 
trated  by  one  spirit,  which  no  interruption  ever  breaks, 
a  harmony  which  becomes  at  length  a  hallucinatory 
and  overwhelming  obsession.”  Or,  as  another  writer 
has  summed  up  the  Chinese  attitude:  “For  them  the 
art  of  life  is  one,  as  this  world  and  the  other  are  one. 
Their  aim  is  to  make  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  here  and 
now.” 

It  is  obvious  that  a  natural  temperament  in  which 
the  art-impulse  is  so  all-embracing,  and  the  aesthetic 
sensibility  so  acute,  might  well  have  been  of  a  perilous 
instability.  We  could  scarcely  have  been  surprised  if, 
like  that  surpassing  episode  in  Egyptian  history  of 
which  Akhenaten  was  the  leader  and  Tell-el-Amarna 
the  tomb,  it  had  only  endured  for  a  moment.  Yet 
Chinese  civilisation,  which  has  throughout  shown  the 
dominating  power  of  this  sensitive  temperament,  has 
lasted  longer  than  any  other.  The  reason  is  that  the 
very  excesses  of  their  temperament  forced  the  Chinese 
to  fortify  themselves  against  its  perils.  The  Great 
Wall,  built  more  than  two  thousand  years  ago,  and 
still  to-day  almost  the  most  impressive  work  of  man  on 
1  E.  Hovelaque,  La  Chine  (Paris,  1920),  p.  47. 


INTRODUCTION 


29 

the  earth,  is  typical  of  this  attitude  of  the  Chinese. 
They  have  exercised  a  stupendous  energy  in  fortifying 
themselves  against  the  natural  enemies  of  their  own 
temperament.  When  one  looks  at  it  from  this  point  of 
view,  it  is  easy  to  see  that,  alike  in  its  large  outlines  and 
its  small  details,  Chinese  life  is  always  the  art  of 
balancing  an  aesthetic  temperament  and  guarding 
against  its  excesses.  We  see  this  in  the  whole  of  the 
ancient  and  still  prevailing  system  of  Confucian 
morality  with  its  insistence  on  formal  ceremony,  even 
when,  departing  from  the  thought  of  its  most  influential 
founder,  —  for  ceremonialism  in  China  would  have 
existed  even  if  Confucius  had  not  lived,  —  it  tended  to 
become  merely  an  external  formalism.  We  see  it  in  the 
massive  solidarity  of  Chinese  life,  the  systematic  social 
organisation  by  which  individual  responsibility,  even 
though  leaving  individuality  itself  intact,  is  merged  in 
the  responsibility  of  the  family  and  the  still  larger 
group.  We  see  it  in  the  whole  drift  of  Chinese  philos¬ 
ophy,  which  is  throughout  sedative  and  contemplative. 
We  see  it  in  the  element  of  stoicism  on  the  one  hand 
and  cruelty  on  the  other  which  in  so  genuinely  good- 
natured  a  people  would  otherwise  seem  puzzling.  The 
Chinese  love  of  flowers  and  gardens  and  landscape 
scenery  is  in  the  same  direction,  and  indeed  one  may 
say  much  the  same  of  Chinese  painting  and  Chinese 
poetry.1  That  is  why  it  is  only  to-day  that  we  in  the 

1  This  point  has  not  escaped  the  more  acute  students  of  Chinese 
civilisation.  Thus  Dr.  John  Steele,  in  his  edition  of  the  I-Li,  remark* 


3© 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


West  have  reached  the  point  of  nervous  susceptibility 
which  enables  us  in  some  degree  to  comprehend  the 
aesthetic  supremacy  which  the  Chinese  reached  more 
than  a  thousand  years  ago. 

Thus,  during  its  extremely  long  history  —  for  the 
other  great  civilisations  with  which  it  was  once  con¬ 
temporary  have  passed  away  or  been  disintegrated  and 
transformed  —  Chinese  civilisation  has  borne  witness 
to  the  great  fact  that  all  human  life  is  art.  It  may  be 
because  they  have  realised  this  so  thoroughly  that  the 
Chinese  have  been  able  to  preserve  their  civilisation  so 
long,  through  all  the  violent  shocks  to  which  it  has 
been  subjected.  There  can  be  no  doubt,  however,  that, 
during  the  greater  part  of  the  last  thousand  years, 
there  has  been,  however  slow  and  gradual,  a  decline  in 
the  vitality  of  Chinese  civilisation,  largely  due,  it  may 
well  be,  to  the  crushing  pressure  of  an  excessive  popula¬ 
tion.  For,  however  remarkable  the  admiration  which 
China  arouses  even  to-day,  its  finest  flowering  periods 
in  the  special  arts  lie  far  in  the  past,  while  in  the  art  of 
living  itself  the  Chinese  have  long  grown  languid.  The 
different  reports  of  ancient  and  modern  travellers 

that  “ceremonial  was  far  from  being  a  series  of  observances,  empty  and 
unprofitable,  such  as  it  degenerated  into  in  later  time.  It  was  meant  to 
inculcate  that  habit  of  sell-control  and  ordered  action  which  was  the  ex¬ 
pression  of  a  mind  fully  instructed  in  the  inner  meaning  of  things,  and 
sensitive  to  every  impression.”  Still  more  clearly,  Reginald  Farrer 
wrote,  in  On  the  Eaves  of  the  World ,  that  “the  philosophic  calm  that  the 
Chinese  deliberately  cultivate  is  their  necessary  armour  to  protect  the 
excessive  susceptibility  to  emotion.  The  Chinese  would  be  for  ever  the 
victims  of  their  nerves  had  they  not  for  four  thousand  years  pursued 
reason  and  self-control  with  self-protective  enthusiasm.” 


INTRODUCTION 


t 


31 


regarding  one  definite  social  manifestation,  the  preva¬ 
lence  of  beggary,  cannot  fail  to  tell  us  something  re¬ 
garding  the  significant  form  of  their  social  life.  Modern 
travellers  complain  of  the  plague  constituted  by  the 
prevalence  of  beggars  in  China;  they  are  even  a  fixed 
and  permanent  institution  on  a  trades-union  basis. 
But  in  the  sixteenth  century  Galeotto  Perera  noticed 
with  surprise  in  China  the  absence  of  beggars,  aa 
Marco  Polo  had  before  him,  and  Friar  Gaspar  de 
Cruz  remarked  that  the  Chinese  so  abhorred  idleness 
that  they  gave  no  alms  to  the  poor  and  mocked  at  the 
Portuguese  for  doing  so:  “Why  give  alms  to  a  knave? 
Let  him  go  and  earn  it.”  Their  own  priests,  he  adds, 
they  sometimes  whipped  as  being  knaves.  (It  should 
be  noted  at  the  same  time  that  it  was  considered  rea¬ 
sonable  only  to  give  half  the  day  to  work,  the  other  half 
to  joy  and  recreation.)  But  they  built  great  asylums 
for  the  helpless  poor,  and  found  employment  for  blind 
women,  gorgeously  dressed  and  painted  with  ceruse 
and  vermilion,  as  prostitutes,  who  were  more  esteemed 
in  early  China  than  they  have  been  since.  That  is  3 
curious  instance  of  the  unflinching  practicality  still 
shown  by  the  Chinese  in  endless  ways.  The  undoubted 
lassitude  in  the  later  phases  of  this  long-lived  Chinese 
culture  has  led  to  features  in  the  art  of  life,  such  as 
beggary  and  dirt  among  the  poor,  not  manifested  in 
the  younger  offshoot  of  Chinese  and  Korean  culture  in 
J  apan,  though  it  is  only  fair  to  point  out  that  impartial 
English  observers,  like  Parker,  consider  this  prevalence 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


32 

of  vermin  and  dirt  as  simply  due  to  the  prevalence  of 
poverty,  and  not  greater  than  we  find  among  the  poor 
in  England  and  elsewhere  in  the  West.  Marco  Polo 
speaks  of  three  hundred  public  baths  in  one  city  alone 
in  his  time.  We  note  also  that  in  the  more  specialised 
arts  the  transcendence  of  China  belongs  to  the  past, 
and  even  sometimes  a  remote  past.  It  is  so  in  the  art  of 
philosophy,  and  the  arts  of  poetry  and  painting.  It  is 
so  also  in  the  art  of  pottery,  in  which  Chinese  su¬ 
premacy  over  the  rest  of  the  world  has  been  longest 
recognised  —  has  not  the  word  ‘‘china”  for  centuries 
been  our  name  for  the  finest  pottery?  —  and  is  most 
beyond  measure.  Our  knowledge  of  the  pottery  of 
various  cultures  excels  that  of  any  other  human  prod¬ 
ucts  because  of  all  it  is  the  most  perdurable.  We  can 
better  estimate  their  relative  aesthetic  worth  now  than 
in  the  days  when  a  general  reverence  for  Greek  anti¬ 
quity  led  to  a  popular  belief  in  the  beauty  of  Greek 
pottery,  though  scarcely  a  single  type  of  its  many 
forms  can  fairly  be  so  considered  or  even  be  compared 
to  the  products  of  the  Minoan  predecessors  of  Greek 
culture,  however  interesting  they  may  still  remain  for 
us  as  the  awkward  and  inappropriate  foundation  for 
exquisite  little  pictures.  The  greatest  age  of  this  uni¬ 
versal  human  art  was  in  China  and  was  over  many 
centuries  ago.  But  with  what  devotion,  with  what 
absolute  concentration  of  the  spirit,  the  Chinese 
potters  of  the  great  period  struggled  with  the  problem 
of  art  is  finely  illustrated  by  the  well-known  story 


INTRODUCTION 


33 

which  an  old  Chinese  historian  tells  of  the  sacrifice  of 
the  divine  T’ung,  the  spirit  who  protects  potters.  It 
happened  that  a  complicated  problem  had  baffled  the 
potters.  T’ung  laid  down  his  life  to  serve  them  and  to 
achieve  the  solution  of  the  problem.  He  plunged  into 
the  fire  and  the  bowl  came  out  perfect.  “The  vessel’s 
perfect  glaze  is  the  god’s  fat  and  blood;  the  body 
material  is  the  god’s  body  of  flesh;  the  blue  of  the 
decoration,  with  the  brilliant  lustre  of  gems,  is  the 
essence  of  the  god’s  pure  spirit.”  That  story  embodies 
the  Chinese  symbol  of  the  art  of  living,  just  as  we 
embody  our  symbol  of  that  art  in  the  Crucifixion  of 
Jesus,  The  form  is  diverse;  the  essence  is  the  same, 

V 

It  will  be  seen  that  when  we  analyse  the  experiences  of 
life  and  look  at  it  simply,  in  the  old-fashioned  way, 
liberated  from  the  artificial  complexities  of  a  tempo¬ 
rary  and  now,  it  may  be,  departing  civilisation,  what 
we  find  is  easy  to  sum  up.  We  find,  that  is  to  say,  that 
Man  has  forced  himself  to  move  along  this  line,  and 
that  line,  and  the  other  line.  But  it  is  the  same  water 
of  life  that  runs  in  all  these  channels.  Until  we  have 
ascended  to  a  height  where  this  is  clear,  to  see  all  our 
little  dogmatisms  will  but  lead  us  astray. 

We  may  illuminatingly  change  the  analogy  and  turn 
to  the  field  of  chemistry.  All  these  various  elements  of 
life  are  but,  as  it  were,  allotropic  forms  of  the  same 
element.  The  most  fundamental  among  these  forms  is 


34 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


that  of  art,  for  life  in  all  its  forms,  even  morality  in  the 
narrowest  sense,  is,  as  Duprat  has  argued,  a  matter  of 
technique,  and  technique  at  once  brings  us  to  the 
elements  of  art.  If  we  would  understand  what  we  are 
dealing  with,  we  may,  therefore,  best  study  these 
forms  under  that  of  art. 

There  is,  however,  a  deeper  chemical  analogy  than 
this  to  be  seen.  It  may  well  be,  indeed,  that  it  is  more 
than  an  analogy.  In  chemistry  we  are  dealing,  not 
merely  with  the  elements  of  life,  but  with  the  elements 
of  the  world,  even  of  what  we  call  our  universe.  It  is 
not  unreasonable  to  think  that  the  same  law  holds 
good  for  both.  We  see  that  the  forms  of  life  may  all  be 
found,  and  then  better  understood,  in  one  form.  Some 
day,  perhaps,  we  shall  also  see  that  that  fact  is  only  a 
corollary  of  the  larger  fact  —  or,  if  any  one  prefers  so 
to  regard  it,  the  smaller  fact  —  that  the  chemical 
elements  of  our  world  can  be  regarded  as  all  only 
transmutations  of  one  element.  From  of  old,  men 
instinctively  divined  that  this  might  be  so,  though 
they  were  merely  concerned  to  change  the  elements 
into  gold,  the  element  which  they  most  highly  valued. 
In  our  own  times  this  transmutation  is  beginning 
to  become,  on  a  minute  scale,  a  demonstrable  fact, 
though  it  would  seem  easier  to  transmute  elements 
into  lead  than  into  gold.  Matter,  we  are  thus  coming 
to  see,  may  not  be  a  confused  variety  of  separate  sub¬ 
stances,  but  simply  a  different  quantitative  arrange¬ 
ment  of  a  single  fundamental  stuff,  which  might  pas- 


INTRODUCTION 


35 


sibly  be  identical  with  hydrogen  or  some  other  already 
known  element.  Similarly  we  may  now  believe  that 
the  men  of  old  who  thought  that  all  human  life  was 
made  of  one  stuff  were  not  altogether  wrong,  and  we 
may,  with  greater  assurance  than  they  were  able  to 
claim,  analyse  the  modes  of  human  action  into  differ¬ 
ent  quantitative  or  other  arrangements  of  which  the 
most  fundamental  may  well  be  identical  with  art. 

This  may  perhaps  become  clearer  if  we  consider 
more  in  detail  one  of  the  separate  arts,  selecting  the 
most  widely  symbolic  of  all,  the  art  that  is  most  clearly 
made  of  the  stuff  of  life,  and  so  able  to  translate  most 
truly  and  clearly  into  beautiful  form  the  various 
modalities  of  life. 


CHAPTER  II 
THE  ART  OF  DANCING 

I 

Dancing  and  building  are  the  two  primary  and  essen¬ 
tial  arts.  The  art  of  dancing  stands  at  the  source  of  all 
the  arts  that  express  themselves  first  in  the  human 
person.  The  art  of  building,  or  architecture,  is  the 
beginning  of  all  the  arts  that  lie  outside  the  person; 
and  in  the  end  they  unite.  Music,  acting,  poetry  pro¬ 
ceed  in  the  one  mighty  stream;  sculpture,  painting,  all 
the  arts  of  design,  in  the  other.  There  is  no  primary 
art  outside  these  two  arts,  for  their  origin  is  far  earlier 
than  man  himself;  and  dancing  came  first.1 

That  is  one  reason  why  dancing,  however  it  may  at 
times  be  scorned  by  passing  fashions,  has  a  profound 
and  eternal  attraction  even  for  those  one  might  sup¬ 
pose  farthest  from  its  influence.  The  joyous  beat  of 
the  feet  of  children,  the  cosmic  play  of  philosophers* 
thoughts  rise  and  fall  according  to  the  same  laws  of 
rhythm.  If  we  are  indifferent  to  the  art  of  dancing,  we 
have  failed  to  understand,  not  merely  the  supreme 
manifestation  of  physical  life,  but  also  the  supreme 
symbol  of  spiritual  life. 

1  It  is  even  possible  that,  in  earlier  than  human  times,  dancing  and 
architecture  may  have  been  the  result  of  the  same  impulse.  The  nest  of 
birds  is  the  chief  early  form  of  building,  and  Edmund  Selous  has  sug¬ 
gested  (. Zoologist ,  December,  1901)  that  the  nest  may  first  have  arisen  aa 
an  accidental  result  of  the  ecstatic  sexual  dance  of  birds. 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING 


11 


The  significance  of  dancing,  in  the  wide  sense,  thus 
lies  in  the  fact  that  it  is  simply  an  intimate  concrete 
appeal  of  a  general  rhythm,  that  general  rhythm 
which  marks,  not  life  only,  but  the  universe,  if  one  may 
still  be  allowed  so  to  name  the  sum  of  the  cosmic  influ¬ 
ences  that  reach  us.  We  need  not,  indeed,  go  so  far  as 
the  planets  or  the  stars  and  outline  their  ethereal 
dances.  We  have  but  to  stand  on  the  seashore  and 
watch  the  waves  that  beat  at  our  feet,  to  observe  that 
at  nearly  regular  intervals  this  seemingly  monotonous 
rhythm  is  accentuated  for  several  beats,  so  that  the 
waves  are  really  dancing  the  measure  of  a  tune.  It 
need  surprise  us  not  at  all  that  rhythm,  ever  tending  to 
be  moulded  into  a  tune,  should  mark  all  the  physical 
and  spiritual  manifestations  of  life.  Dancing  is  the 
primitive  expression  alike  of  religion  and  of  love  —  of 
religion  from  the  earliest  human  times  we  know  of  and 
of  love  from  a  period  long  anterior  to  the  coming  of 
man.  The  art  of  dancing,  moreover,  is  intimately 
entwined  with  all  human  tradition  of  war,  of  labour,  of 
pleasure,  of  education,  while  some  of  the  wisest  phi¬ 
losophers  and  the  most  ancient  civilisations  have  re¬ 
garded  the  dance  as  the  pattern  in  accordance  with 
which  the  moral  life  of  men  must  be  woven.  To  realise, 
therefore,  what  dancing  means  for  mankind  —  the 
poignancy  and  the  many-sidedness  of  its  appeal  —  we 
must  survey  the  whole  sweep  of  human  life,  both  at  its 
highest  and  at  its  deepest  moments. 


3® 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


n 

“  Wiiat  do  you  dance? ”  When  a  man  belonging  to  one 
branch  of  the  great  Bantu  division  of  mankind  met  a 
member  of  another,  said  Livingstone,  that  was  the 
question  he  asked.  What  a  man  danced,  that  was  his 
tribe,  his  social  customs,  his  religion ;  for,  as  an  anthro¬ 
pologist  has  put  it,  “a  savage  does  not  preach  his 
religion,  he  dances  it.” 

There  are  peoples  in  the  world  who  have  no  secular 
dances,  only  religious  dances;  and  some  investigators 
believe  with  Gerland  that  every  dance  was  of  religious 
origin.  That  view  may  seem  too  extreme,  even  if  we 
admit  that  some  even  of  our  modern  dances,  like  the 
waltz,  may  have  been  originally  religious.  Even  still 
(as  Skene  has  shown  among  the  Arabs  and  Swahili  of 
Africa)  so  various  are  dances  and  their  functions  among 
some  peoples  that  they  cover  the  larger  part  of  life. 
Yet  we  have  to  remember  that  for  primitive  man 
there  is  no  such  thing  as  religion  apart  from  life,  for 
religion  covers  everything.  Dancing  is  a  magical  oper¬ 
ation  for  the  attainment  of  real  and  important  ends 
of  every  kind.  It  was  clearly  of  immense  benefit  to 
the  individual  and  to  society,  by  imparting  strength 
and  adding  organised  harmony.  It  seemed  reason¬ 
able  to  suppose  that  it  attained  other  beneficial  ends, 
that  were  incalculable,  for  calling  down  blessings 
or  warding  off  misfortunes.  We  may  conclude,  with 
Wundt,  that  the  dance  was,  in  the  beginning,  th« 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING 


39 

expression  of  the  whole  man,  for  the  whole  man  was 
religious.1 

Thus,  among  primitive  peoples,  religion  being  so 
large  a  part  of  life,  the  dance  inevitably  becomes  of 
supreme  religious  importance.  To  dance  was  at  once 
both  to  worship  and  to  pray.  Just  as  we  still  find  in 
aur  Prayer  Books  that  there  are  divine  services  for  all 
the  great  fundamental  acts  of  life,  • —  for  birth,  for  mar¬ 
riage,  for  death,  • —  as  well  as  for  the  cosmic  procession 
of  the  world  as  marked  by  ecclesiastical  festivals,  and 
for  the  great  catastrophes  of  nature,  such  as  droughts, 
so  also  it  has  ever  been  among  primitive  peoples.  For 
all  the  solemn  occasions  of  life,  for  bridals  and  for 
funerals,  for  .seed-time  and  for  harvest,  for  war  and 
for  peace,  for  all  these  things  there  were  fitting  dances. 
To-day  we  find  religious  people  who  in  church  pray  for 
rain  or  for  the  restoration  of  their  friends  to  health. 
Their  forefathers  also  desired  these  things,  but,  instead 
of  praying  for  them,  they  danced  for  them  the  fitting 
dance  which  tradition  had  handed  down,  and  which 
the  chief  or  the  medicine-man  solemnly  conducted. 
The  gods  themselves  danced,  as  the  stars  dance  in  the 
sky  —  so  at  least  the  Mexicans,  and  we  may  be  sure 
many  other  peoples,  have  held ;  and  to  dance  is  there- 

1  “Not  the  epic  song,  but  the  dance,”  Wundt  says  (Vdlker psy¬ 
chologic,  3d  ed.  1911,  Bd.  1,  Teil  1,  p.  277),  “accompanied  by  a  monotonous 
and  often  meaningless  song,  constitutes  everywhere  the  most  primitive, 
and,  in  spite  of  that  primitiveness,  the  most  highly  developed  art. 
Whether  as  a  ritual  dance,  or  as  a  pure  emotional  expression  of  the  joy 
in  rhythmic  bodily  movement,  it.  rules  the  life  of  primitive  men  to  &uclt 
a  degree  that  ail  other  forms  of  art  are  subordinate  to  it.” 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


40 

fore  to  imitate  the  gods,  to  work  with  them,  perhaps 
to  persuade  them  to  work  in  the  direction  of  our  own 
desires.  “Work  for  us!”  is  the  song-refrain,  expressed 
or  implied,  of  every  religious  dance.  In  the  worship  of 
solar  deities  in  various  countries,  it  was  customary  to 
dance  round  the  altar,  as  the  stars  dance  round  the 
sun.  Even  in  Europe  the  popular  belief  that  the  sun 
dances  on  Easter  Sunday  has  perhaps  scarcely  yet  died 
out.  To  dance  is  to  take  part  in  the  cosmic  control  of 
the  world.  Every  sacred  Dionysian  dance  is  an  imita¬ 
tion  of  the  divine  dance. 

All  religions,  and  not  merely  those  of  primitive 
character,  have  been  at  the  outset,  and  sometimes 
throughout,  in  some  measure  saltatory.  That  was 
recognised  even  in  the  ancient  world  by  acute  ob¬ 
servers,  like  Lucian,  who  remarks  in  his  essay  on  danc¬ 
ing  that  “you  cannot  find  a  single  ancient  mystery  in 
which  there  is  no  dancing;  in  fact  most  people  say  of 
the  devotees  of  the  Mysteries  that  ‘they  dance  them 
out.'”  This  is  so  all  over  the  world.  It  is  not  more 
pronounced  in  early  Christianity,  and  among  the 
ancient  Hebrews  who  danced  before  the  ark,  than 
among  the  Australian  aborigines  whose  great  cor- 
roborees.  are  religious  dances  conducted  by  the  medi¬ 
cine-men  with  their  sacred  staves  in  their  hands.  Ev¬ 
ery  American  Indian  tribe  seems  to  have  had  its  own 
religious  dances,  varied  and  elaborate,  often  with  a 
richness  of  meaning  which  the  patient  study  of  modern 
investigators  has  but  slowly  revealed.  The  Shamans 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING 


41 


in  the  remote  steppes  of  Northern  Siberia  have  their 
ecstatic  religious  dances,  and  in  modern  Europe  the 
Turkish  dervishes  —  perhaps  of  related  stock  —  still 
dance  in  their  cloisters  similar  ecstatic  dances,  com¬ 
bined  with  song  and  prayer,  as  a  regular  part  of  devo¬ 
tional  service. 

These  religious  dances,  it  may  be  observed,  are 
sometimes  ecstatic,  sometimes  pantomimic.  It  is 
natural  that  this  should  be  so.  By  each  road  it  is 
possible  to  penetrate  towards  the  divine  mystery  of 
the  world.  The  auto-intoxication  of  rapturous  move¬ 
ment  brings  the  devotees,  for  a  while  at  least,  into  that 
self-forgetful  union  with  the  not-self  which  the  mystic 
ever  seeks.  The  ecstatic  Hindu  dance  in  honour  of  the 
pre-Aryan  hill  god,  afterwards  Siva,  became  in  time  a 
great  symbol,  “the  clearest  image  of  the  activity  of 
God,”  it  has  been  called,  “which  any  art  or  religion 
can  boast  of.”  1  Pantomimic  dances,  on  the  other 
hand,  with  their  effort  to  heighten  natural  expression 
and  to  imitate  natural  process,  bring  the  dancers  into 
the  divine  sphere  of  creation  and  enable  them  to  assist 
vicariously  in  the  energy  of  the  gods.  The  dance  thus 
becomes  the  presentation  of  a  divine  drama,  the  vital 
reenactment  of  a  sacred  history,  in  which  the  wor¬ 
shipper  is  enabled  to  play  a  real  part.2  In  this  way 
ritual  arises. 

1  See  an  interesting  essay  in  The  Dance  of  Siva:  Fourteen  Indian 
Essays,  by  Ananda  Coomaraswamy.  New  York,  1918. 

*  This  view  was  clearly  put  forward,  long  ago,  by  W.  W.  Newell  at  the 
International  Congress  of  Anthropology  at  Chicago  in  1893.  It  has  be¬ 
come  almost  a  commonplace  since. 


42 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


It  is  in  this  sphere  —  highly  primitive  as  it  is  —  of 
pantomimic  dancing  crystallised  in  ritual,  rather  than 
in  the  sphere  of  ecstatic  dancing,  that  we  may  to-day 
in  civilisation  witness  the  survivals  of  the  dance  in 
religion.  The  divine  services  of  the  American  Indian, 
said  Lewis  Morgan,  took  the  form  of  “set  dances,  each 
with  its  own  name,  songs,  steps,  and  costume.”  At  this 
point  the  early  Christian,  worshipping  the  Divine 
Body,  was  able  to  join  in  spiritual  communion  with  the 
ancient  Egyptian  or  the  later  Japanese 1  or  the  modern 
American  Indian.  They  are  all  alike  privileged  to 
enter,  each  in  his  own  way,  a  sacred  mystery,  and  to 
participate  in  the  sacrifice  of  a  heavenly  Mass. 

What  by  some  is  considered  to  be  the  earliest  known 
Christian  ritual  —  the  “Hymn  of  Jesus”  assigned  to 
the  second  century  —  is  nothing  but  a  sacred  dance. 
Eusebius  in  the  third  century  stated  that  Philo’s  de¬ 
scription  of  the  worship  of  the  Therapeuts  agreed  at 
all  points  with  Christian  custom,  and  that  meant  the 
prominence  of  dancing,  to  which  indeed  Eusebius  often 
refers  in  connection  with  Christian  worship.  It  has 
been  supposed  by  some  that  the  Christian  Church  was 
originally  a  theatre,  the  choir  being  the  raised  stage, 
even  the  word  “choir,”  it  is  argued,  meaning  an  en¬ 
closed  space  for  dancing.  It  is  certain  that  at  the 

1  See  a  charming  paper  by  Marcella  Azra  Hincks,  "The  Art  of  Dancing 
in  Japan,”  Fortnightly  Review ,  July,  1906.  Pantomimic  dancing,  which 
has  played  a  highly  important  part  in  Japan,  was  introduced  into  re¬ 
ligion  from  China,  it  is  said,  in  the  earliest  time,  and  was  not  adapted  to 
secular  purposes  until  the  sixteenth  century. 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING 


43 


Eucharist  the  faithful  gesticulated  with  their  hands, 
danced  with  their  feet,  flung  their  bodies  about. 
Chrysostom,  who  referred  to  this  behaviour  round 
the  Holy  Table  at  Antioch,  only  objected  to  drunken 
excesses  in  connection  with  it;  the  custom  itself  he 
evidently  regarded  as  traditional  and  right. 

While  the  central  function  of  Christian  worship  is  a 
sacred  drama,  a  divine  pantomime,  the  associations  of 
Christianity  and  dancing  are  by  no  means  confined  to 
the  ritual  of  the  Mass  and  its  later  more  attenuated 
transformations.  The  very  idea  of  dancing  had  a  sa¬ 
cred  and  mystic  meaning  to  the  early  Christians,  who 
had  meditated  profoundly  on  the  text,  “We  have  piped 
unto  you  and  ye  have  not  danced.”  Origen  prayed 
that  above  all  things  there  may  be  made  operative  in  us 
the  mystery  “of  the  stars  dancing  in  Heaven  for  the 
salvation  of  the  Universe.”  So  that  the  monks  of 
the  Cistercian  Order,  who  in  a  later  age  worked  for  the 
world  more  especially  by  praying  for  it  (“orare  est  la- 
borare”),  were  engaged  in  the  same  task  on  earth  as 
the  stars  in  Heaven ;  dancing  and  praying  are  the  same 
thing.  St.  Basil,  who  was  so  enamoured  of  natural 
things,  described  the  angels  dancing  in  Heaven,  and 
later  the  author  of  the  “Dieta  Salutis”  (said  to  have 
been  St.  Bonaventura),  which  is  supposed  to  have  in¬ 
fluenced  Dante  in  assigning  so  large  a  place  to  dancing 
in  the  “  Paradiso,”  described  dancing  as  the  occupation 
of  the  inmates  of  Heaven,  and  Christ  as  the  leader  of 
the  dance.  Even  in  more  modern  times  an  ancient 


44 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


Cornish  carol  sang  of  the  life  of  Jesus  as  a  dance,  and 
represented  him  as  declaring  that  he  died  in  order 
that  man  “may  come  unto  the  general  dance.”  1 

This  attitude  could  not  fail  to  be  reflected  in  prac¬ 
tice.  Genuine  dancing,  not  merely  formalised  and  un¬ 
recognisable  dancing,  such  as  the  traditionalised  Mass, 
must  have  been  frequently  introduced  into  Christian 
worship  in  early  times.  Until  a  few  centuries  ago  it  re¬ 
mained  not  uncommon,  and  it  even  still  persists  in  re¬ 
mote  corners  of  the  Christian  world.  In  English  cathe¬ 
drals  dancing  went  on  until  the  fourteenth  century.  At 
Paris,  Limoges,  and  elsewhere  in  France,  the  priests 
danced  in  the  choir  at  Easter  up  to  the  seventeenth 
century,  in  Roussillon  up  to  the  eighteenth  century. 
Roussillon  is  a  Catalan  province  with  Spanish  tradi¬ 
tions,  and  it  is  in  Spain,  where  dancing  is  a  deeper  and 
more  passionate  impulse  than  elsewhere  in  Europe, 
that  religious  dancing  took  firmest  root  and  flourished 
longest.  In  the  cathedrals  of  Seville,  Toledo,  Valencia, 
and  Jeres  there  was  formerly  dancing,  though  it  now 
only  survives  at  a  few  special  festivals  in  the  first.2  At 
Alaro  in  Mallorca,  also  at  the  present  day,  a  dancing 

1  I  owe  some  of  these  facts  to  an  interesting  article  by  G.  R.  Mead, 
“The  Sacred  Dance  of  Jesus,”  The  Quest ,  October,  1910. 

2  The  dance  of  the  Seises  in  Seville  Cathedral  is  evidently  of  great 
antiquity,  though  it  was  so  much  a  matter  of  course  that  we  do  not  hear 
of  it  until  1690,  when  the  Archbishop  of  the  day,  in  opposition  to  the 
Chapter,  wished  to  suppress  it.  A  decree  of  the  King  was  finally  obtained 
permitting  it,  provided  it  was  performed  only  by  men,  so  that  evidently, 
before  that  date,  girls  as  well  as  boys  took  part  in  it.  Rev.  John  Morris, 
“Dancing  in  Churches,”  The  Month ,  December,  1892;  also  a  valuable 
article  on  the  Seises  by  J.  B.  Trend,  in  Music  and  Letters ,  January,  1921. 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING  45 

company  called  Els  Cosiers,  on  the  festival  of  St.  Roch, 
the  patron  saint  of  the  place,  dance  in  the  church  in 
fanciful  costumes  with  tambourines,  up  to  the  steps  of 
the  high  altar,  immediately  after  Mass,  and  then  dance 
out  of  the  church.  In  another  part  of  the  Christian 
world,  in  the  Abyssinian  Church  —  an  offshoot  of  the 
Eastern  Church  —  dancing  is  also  said  still  to  form 
part  of  the  worship. 

Dancing,  we  may  see  throughout  the  world,  has  been 
so  essential,  so  fundamental,  a  part  of  all  vital  and  un¬ 
degenerate  religion,  that,  whenever  a  new  religion  ap¬ 
pears,  a  religion  of  the  spirit  and  not  merely  an  anaemic 
religion  of  the  intellect,  we  should  still  have  to  ask  of  it 
the  question  of  the  Bantu:  “What  do  you  dance? ” 

III 

Dancing  is  not  only  intimately  associated  with  reli¬ 
gion,  it  has  an  equally  intimate  association  with  love. 
Here,  indeed,  the  relationship  is  even  more  primitive, 
for  it  is  far  older  than  man.  Dancing,  said  Lucian,  is  as 
old  as  love.  Among  insects  and  among  birds  it  may  be 
said  that  dancing  is  often  an  essential  part  of  love.  In 
courtship  the  male  dances,  sometimes  in  rivalry  with 
other  males,  in  order  to  charm  the  female;  then,  after  a 
short  or  long  interval,  the  female  is  aroused  to  share  his 
ardour  and  join  in  the  dance;  the  final  climax  of  the 
dance  is  the  union  of  the  lovers.  Among  the  mammals 
most  nearly  related  to  man,  indeed,  dancing  is  but  little 
developed:  their  energies  are  more  variously  diffused, 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


46 

though  a  close  observer  of  the  apes,  Dr.  Louis  Robin* 
son,  has  pointed  out  that  the  “spasmodic  jerking  of 
the  chimpanzee’s  feeble  legs,”  pounding  the  partition 
of  his  cage,  is  the  crude  motion  out  of  which  “the  heav¬ 
enly  alchemy  of  evolution  has  created  the  divine 
movements  of  Pavlova”;  but  it  must  be  remembered 
that  the  anthropoid  apes  are  offshoots  only  from  the 
stock  that  produced  Man,  his  cousins  and  not  his  an¬ 
cestors.  It  is  the  more  primitive  love-dance  of  insects 
and  birds  that  seems  to  reappear  among  human  sav¬ 
ages  in  various  parts  of  the  world,  notably  in  Africa, 
and  in  a  conventionalised  and  symbolised  form  it  is 
still  danced  in  civilisation  to-day.  Indeed,  it  is  in  this 
aspect  that  dancing  has  so  often  aroused  reprobation, 
from  the  days  of  early  Christianity  until  the  present, 
among  those  for  whom  the  dance  has  merely  been,  in 
the  words  of  a  seventeenth-century  writer,  a  series  of 
“immodest  and  dissolute  movements  by  which  the 
cupidity  of  the  flesh  is  aroused.” 

But  in  nature  and  among  primitive  peoples  it  has  its 
value  precisely  on  this  account.  It  is  a  process  of  court¬ 
ship  and,  even  more  than  that,  it  is  a  novitiate  for  love, 
and  a  novitiate  which  was  found  to  be  an  admirable 
training  for  love.  Among  some  peoples,  indeed,  as  the 
Omahas,  the  same  word  meant  both  to  dance  and  to 
love.  By  his  beauty,  his  energy,  his  skill,  the  male 
must  win  the  female,  so  impressing  the  image  of  him¬ 
self  on  her  imagination  that  finally  her  desire  is  aroused 
to  overcome  her  reticence.  That  is  the  task  of  the  mule 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING 


throughout  nature,  and  in  innumerable  species  besides 
Man  it  has  been  found  that  the  school  in  which  the 
task  may  best  be  learnt  is  the  dancing-school.  Those 
who  have  not  the  skill  and  the  strength  to  learn  are  left 
behind,  and,  as  they  are  probably  the  least  capable 
members  of  the  race,  it  may  be  in  this  way  that  a  kind 
of  sexual  selection  has  been  embodied  in  unconscious 
eugenics,  and  aided  the  higher  development  of  the  race. 
The  moths  and  the  butterflies,  the  African  ostrich  and 
the  Sumatran  argus  pheasant,  with  their  fellows  in¬ 
numerable,  have  been  the  precursors  of  man  in  the 
strenuous  school  of  erotic  dancing,  fitting  themselves 
for  selection  by  the  females  of  their  choice  as  the  most 
splendid  progenitors  of  the  future  race.1 

From  this  point  of  view,  it  is  clear,  the  dance  per¬ 
formed  a  double  function.  On  the  one  hand,  the  tend¬ 
ency  to  dance,  arising  under  the  obscure  stress  of  this 
impulse,  brought  out  the  best  possibilities  the  individ¬ 
ual  held  the  promise  of;  on  the  other  hand,  at  the  mo¬ 
ment  of  courtship,  the  display  of  the  activities  thus  ac¬ 
quired  developed  on  the  sensory  side  all  the  latent  pos¬ 
sibilities  of  beauty  which  at  last  became  conscious  in 
man.  That  this  came  about  we  cannot  easily  escape 
concluding.  How  it  came  about,  how  it  happens  that 
some  of  the  least  intelligent  of  creatures  thus  developed 
a  beauty  and  a  grace  that  are  enchanting  even  to  our 


-  See,  for  references,  Havelock  Ellis,  Studies  in  the  Psychology  of  Sex , 
vol.  hi;  Analysis  of  the  Sexual  Impulse ,  pp.  29,  etc.;  and  Wester  marck. 
History  of  Human  Marriage ,  vol.  1,  chap,  xm,  p.  470. 


48  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

human  eyes,  is  a  miracle,  even  if  not  affected  by  the 
mystery  of  sex,  which  we  cannot  yet  comprehend. 

When  we  survey  the  human  world,  the  erotic  dance 
of  the  animal  world  is  seen  not  to  have  lost,  but  rather 
to  have  gained,  influence.  It  is  no  longer  the  males 
alone  who  are  thus  competing  for  the  love  of  the  fe¬ 
males.  It  comes  about  by  a  modification  in  the  earlier 
method  of  selection  that  often  not  only  the  men  dance 
for  the  women,  but  the  women  for  the  men,  each  striv¬ 
ing  in  a  storm  of  rivalry  to  arouse  and  attract  the  de¬ 
sire  of  the  other.  In  innumerable  parts  of  the  world  the 
season  of  love  is  a  time  which  the  nubile  of  each  sex 
devote  to  dancing  in  each  other’s  presence,  sometimes 
one  sex,  sometimes  the  other,  sometimes  both,  in  the 
frantic  effort  to  display  all  the  force  and  energy,  the 
skill  and  endurance,  the  beauty  and  grace,  which  at 
this  moment  are  yearning  within  them  to  be  poured 
into  the  stream  of  the  race’s  life. 

From  this  point  of  view  we  may  better  understand 
the  immense  ardour  with  which  every  part  of  the  won¬ 
derful  human  body  has  been  brought  into  the  play  of 
the  dance.  The  men  and  women  of  races  spread  all 
over  the  world  have  shown  a  marvellous  skill  and  pa¬ 
tience  in  imparting  rhythm  and  measure  to  the  most 
unlikely,  the  most  rebellious  regions  of  the  body,  all 
wrought  by  desire  into  potent  and  dazzling  images.  To 
the  vigorous  races  of  Northern  Europe  in  their  cold 
damp  climate,  dancing  comes  naturally  to  be  dancing 
of  the  legs,  so  naturally  that  the  English  poet,  as  a  mat- 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING  49 

fcer  of  course,  assumes  that  the  dance  of  Salome  was  a 
‘‘twinkling  of  the  feet.”  1  But  on  the  opposite  side  of 
the  world,  in  Japan  and  notably  in  java  and  Madagas¬ 
car,  dancing  may  be  exclusively  dancing  of  the  arms 
and  hands,  in  some  of  the  South  Sea  Islands  of  the 
hands  and  fingers  alone.  Dancing  may  even  be  carried 
on  in  the  seated  posture,  as  occurs  at  Fiji  in  a  dance 
connected  with  the  preparation  of  the  sacred  drink, 
ava.  In  some  districts  of  Southern  Tunisia  dancing, 
again,  is  dancing  of  the  hair,  and  all  night  long,  till  they 
perhaps  fall  exhausted,  the  marriageable  girls  will  move 
their  heads  to  the  rhythm  of  a  song,  maintaining  their 
hair  in  perpetual  balance  and  sway.  Elsewhere,  no¬ 
tably  in  Africa,  but  also  sometimes  in  Polynesia,  as  well 
as  in  the  dances  that  had  established  themselves  in  an¬ 
cient  Rome,  dancing  is  dancing  of  the  body,  with  vi¬ 
bratory  or  rotatory  movements  of  breasts  or  flanks. 
The  complete  dance  along  these  lines  is,  however,  that 
in  which  the  play  of  all  the  chief  muscle-groups  of  the 
body  is  harmoniously  interwoven.  When  both  sexes 
take  part  in  such  an  exercise,  developed  into  an  ideal¬ 
ised  yet  passionate  pantomime  of  love,  we  have  the 
complete  erotic  dance.  In  the  beautiful  ancient  civili¬ 
sation  of  the  Pacific,  it  is  probable  that  this  ideal  was 

1  At  an  earlier  period,  however,  the  dance  of  Salome  was  understood 
much  more  freely  and  often  more  accurately.  As  Enlart  has  pointed  out, 
on  a  capital  in  the  twelfth-century  cloister  of  Moissac,  Salome  holds  a 
kind  of  castanets  in  her  raised  hands  as  she  dances;  on  one  of  the  western 
portals  of  Rouen  Cathedral,  at  the  beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century, 
she  is  dancing  on  her  hands;  v/hile  at  Hemelverdeghem  she  is  really 
executing  the  morisco,  the  “danse  du  ventre." 


50 


t 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


sometimes  reached,  and  at  Tahiti,  in  1772,  an  old  voy¬ 
ager  crudely  and  summarily  described  the  native  dance 
as  “an  endless  variety  of  posturings  and  wagglings  of 
the  body,  hands,  feet,  eyes,  lips,  and  tongue,  in  which 
they  keep  splendid  time  to  the  measured’  In  Spain  the 
dance  of  this  kind  has  sometimes  attained  its  noblest 
and  most  harmoniously  beautiful  expression.  From 
the  narratives  of  travellers,  it  would  appear  that  it  was 
especially  in  the  eighteenth  century  that  among  all 
classes  in  Spain  dancing  of  this  kind  was  popular.  The 
Church  tacitly  encouraged  it,  an  Aragonese  Canon  told 
Baretti  in  1770,  in  spite  of  its  occasional  indecorum,  as 
a  useful  safety-valve  for  the  emotions.  It  was  not  less 
seductive  to  the  foreign  spectator  than  to  the  people 
themselves.  The  grave  traveller  Peyron,  towards  the 
end  of  the  century,  growing  eloquent  over  the  languor¬ 
ous  and  flexible  movements  of  the  dance,  the  bewitch¬ 
ing  attitude,  the  voluptuous  curves  of  the  arms,  declares 
that,  when  one  sees  a  beautiful  Spanish  woman  dance, 
one  is  inclined  to  fling  all  philosophy  to  the  winds.  And 
even  that  highly  respectable  Anglican  clergyman,  the 
Reverend  Joseph  Townsend,  was  constrained  to  state 
that  he  could  “almost  persuade  myself”  that  if  the 
fandango  were  suddenly  played  in  church  the  gravest 
worshippers  would  start  up  to  join  in  that  “lascivious 
pantomime.”  There  we  have  the  rock  against  which 
the  primitive  dance  of  sexual  selection  suffers  ship¬ 
wreck  as  civilisation  advances.  And  that  prejudice  of 
civilisation  becomes  so  ingrained  that  it  is  brought  to 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING 


5* 

bear  even  on  the  primitive  dance.  The  pygmies  of  Af¬ 
rica  are  described  by  Sir  H.  H.  Johnston  as  a  very  dec¬ 
orous  and  highly  moral  people,  but  their  dances,  he 
adds,  are  not  so.  Yet  these  dances,  though  to  the  eyes 
of  Johnston,  blinded  by  European  civilisation,  “grossly 
indecent,”  he  honestly,  and  inconsistently,  adds,  are 
“danced  reverently.” 


IV 

From  the  vital  function  of  dancing  in  love,  and  its  sa¬ 
cred  function  in  religion,  to  dancing  as  an  art,  a  pro¬ 
fession,  an  amusement,  may  seem,  at  the  first  glance,  a 
sudden  leap.  In  reality  the  transition  is  gradual,  and 
it  began  to  be  made  at  a  very  early  period  in  diverse 
parts  of  the  globe.  All  the  matters  that  enter  into 
courtship  tend  to  fall  under  the  sway  of  art;  their  aes¬ 
thetic  pleasure  is  a  secondary  reflection  of  their  pri¬ 
mary  vital  joy.  Dancing  could  not  fail  to  be  first  in 
manifesting  this  tendency.  But  even  religious  danc¬ 
ing  swiftly  exhibited  the  same  transformation ;  dancing, 
like  priesthood,  became  a  profession,  and  dancers,  like 
priests,  formed  a  caste.  This,  for  instance,  took  place 
in  old  Hawaii.  The  hula  dance  was  a  religious  dance; 
it  required  a  special  education  and  an  arduous  train¬ 
ing;  moreover,  it  involved  the  observance  of  important 
taboos  and  the  exercise  of  sacred  rites;  by  the  very  fact 
of  its  high  specialisation  it  came  to  be  carried  out  by 
paid  performers,  a  professional  caste.  In  India,  again, 
the  Devadasis,  or  sacred  dancing  girls,  are  at  once  both 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


52 

religious  and  professional  dancers.  They  are  married  to 
gods,  they  are  taught  dancing  by  the  Brahmins,  they 
figure  in  religious  ceremonies,  and  their  dances  repre¬ 
sent  the  life  of  the  god  they  are  married  to  as  well  as 
the  emotions  of  love  they  experience  for  him.  Yet,  at 
the  same  time,  they  also  give  professional  performances 
in  the  houses  of  rich  private  persons  who  pay  for  them. 
It  thus  comes  about  that  to  the  foreigner  the  Devada- 
sis  scarcely  seem  very  unlike  the  Ramedjenis,  the  danc¬ 
ers  of  the  street,  who  are  of  very  different  origin,  and 
mimic  in  their  performances  the  play  of  merely  human 
passions.  The  Portuguese  conquerors  of  India  called 
both  kinds  of  dancers  indiscriminately  Balheideras  (or 
dancers)  which  we  have  corrupted  in  Bayaderes.1 

In  our  modern  world  professional  dancing  as  an  art 
has  become  altogether  divorced  from  religion,  and 
even,  in  any  biological  sense,  from  love;  it  is  scarcely 
even  possible,  so  far  as  Western  civilisation  is  con¬ 
cerned,  to  trace  back  the  tradition  to  either  source.  If 
we  survey  the  development  of  dancing  as  an  art  in  Em 
rope,  it  seems  to  me  that  we  have  to  recognise  two 
streams  of  tradition  which  have  sometimes  merged, 
but  yet  remain  in  their  ideals  and  their  tendencies  es¬ 
sentially  distinct.  I  would  call  these  traditions  the 
Classical,  which  is  much  the  more  ancient  and  funda¬ 
mental,  and  may  be  said  to  be  of  Egyptian  origin,  and 


1  For  an  excellent  account  of  dancing  in  India,  now  being  degraded 
by  modern  civilisation,  see  Otto  Rothfeld,  Women  0/  India,  chap.  vil( 
“The  Dancing  Girl,”  1922. 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING 


53 


the  Romantic,  which  is  of  Italian  origin,  chiefly  known 
to  us  as  the  ballet.  The  first  is,  in  its  pure  form,  solo 
dancing  —  though  it  may  be  danced  in  couples  and 
many  together  —  and  is  based  on  the  rhythmic  beauty 
and  expressiveness  of  the  simple  human  personality 
when  its  energy  is  concentrated  in  measured  yet  pas¬ 
sionate  movement.  The  second  is  concerted  dancing, 
mimetic  and  picturesque,  wherein  the  individual  is  sub¬ 
ordinated  to  the  wider  and  variegated  rhythm  of  the 
group.  It  may  be  easy  to  devise  another  classification, 
but  this  is  simple  and  instructive  enough  for  our  pur¬ 
pose. 

There  can  scarcely  be  a  doubt  that  Egypt  has  been 
for  many  thousands  of  years,  as  indeed  it  still  remains, 
a  great  dancing  centre,  the  most  influential  dancing- 
school  the  world  has  ever  seen,  radiating  its  influence 
to  south  and  east  and  north.  We  may  perhaps  even 
agree  with  the  historian  of  the  dance  who  terms  it 
“the  mother-country  of  all  civilised  dancing.”  We  are 
not  entirely  dependent  on  the  ancient  wall-pictures  of 
Egypt  for  our  knowledge  of  Egyptian  skill  in  the  art. 
Sacred  mysteries,  it  is  known,  were  danced  in  the 
temples,  and  queens  and  princesses  took  part  in  the 
orchestras  that  accompanied  them.  It  is  significant 
that  the  musical  instruments  still  peculiarly  associated 
with  the  dance  were  originated  or  developed  in  Egypt ; 
the  guitar  is  an  Egyptian  instrument  and  its  name  was 
a  hieroglyph  already  used  when  the  Pyramids  were 
being  built;  the  cymbal,  the  tambourine,  triangles, 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


54 

castanets,  in  one  form  or  another,  were  all  familiar  to 
the  ancient  Egyptians,  and  with  the  Egyptian  art  of 
dancing  they  must  have  spread  all  round  the  shores  of 
the  Mediterranean,  the  great  focus  of  our  civilisation, 
at  a  very  early  date.1  Even  beyond  the  Mediterra¬ 
nean,  at  Cadiz,  dancing  that  was  essentially  Egyptian 
in  character  was  established,  and  Cadiz  became  the 
dancing-school  of  Spain.  The  Nile  and  Cadiz  were 
thus  the  two  great  centres  of  ancient  dancing,  and  Mar¬ 
tial  mentions  them  both  together,  for  each  supplied 
its  dancers  to  Rome.  This  dancing,  alike  whether 
Egyptian  or  Gaditanian,  was  the  expression  of  the 
individual  dancer’s  body  and  art;  the  garments  played 
but  a  small  part  in  it,  they  were  frequently  trans¬ 
parent,  and  sometimes  discarded  altogether.  It  was, 
and  it  remains,  simple,  personal,  passionate  dancing, 
classic,  therefore,  in  the  same  sense  as,  on  the  side  of 
literature,  the  poetry  of  Catullus  is  classic.  2 

1  I  may  hazard  the  suggestion  that  the  gypsies  may  possibly  have 
acquired  their  rather  unaccountable  name  of  Egyptians,  not  so  much 
because  they  had  passed  through  Egypt,  the  reason  which  is  generally 
suggested,  —  for  they  must  have  passed  through  many  countries,  — 
but  because  of  their  proficiency  in  dances  of  the  recognised  Egyptian 
type. 

2  It  is  interesting  to  observe  that  Egypt  still  retains,  almost  unchanged 
through  fifty  centuries,  its  traditions,  technique,  and  skill  in  dancing, 
while,  as  in  ancient  Egyptian  dancing,  the  garment  forms  an  almost  or 
quite  negligible  element  in  the  art.  Loret  remarks  that  a  charming 
Egyptian  dancer  of  the  Eighteenth  Dynasty,  whose  picture  in  her  trans¬ 
parent  gauze  he  reproduces,  is  an  exact  portrait  of  a  charming  Almeh  of 
to-day  whom  he  has  seen  dancing  in  Thebes  with  the  same  figure,  the 
same  dressing  of  the  hair,  the  same  jewels.  I  hear  from  a  physician,  a 
gynaecologist  now  practising  in  Egypt,  that  a  dancing-girl  can  lie  on  her 
back,  and  with  a  full  glass  of  water  standing  on  one  side  of  her  abdomen 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING 


55 


Ancient  Greek  dancing  was  essentially  classic  danc¬ 
ing,  as  here  understood.  On  the  Greek  vases,  as  re¬ 
produced  in  Emmanuel’s  attractive  book  on  Greek 
dancing  and  elsewhere,  we  find  the  same  play  of  the 
arms,  the  same  sideward  turn,  the  same  extreme  back¬ 
ward  extension  of  the  body,  which  had  long  before 
been  represented  in  Egyptian  monuments.  Many 
supposedly  modern  movements  in  dancing  were  cer¬ 
tainly  already  common  both  to  Egyptian  and  Greek 
dancing,  as  well  as  the  clapping  of  hands  to  keep  time 
which  is  still  an  accompaniment  of  Spanish  dancing. 
It  seems  clear,  however,  that,  on  this  general  classic 
and  Mediterranean  basis,  Greek  dancing  had  a  de¬ 
velopment  so  refined  and  so  special  —  though  in 
technical  elaboration  of  steps,  it  seems  likely,  inferior 
to  modern  dancing  —  that  it  exercised  no  influence 
outside  Greece.  Dancing  became,  indeed,  the  most 
characteristic  and  the  most  generally  cultivated  of 
Greek  arts.  Pindar,  in  a  splendid  Oxyrhynchine  frag¬ 
ment,  described  Hellas,  in  what  seemed  to  him  su¬ 
preme  praise,  as  “the  land  of  lovely  dancing,”  and 
Athenaeus  pointed  out  that  he  calls  Apollo  the  Dancer. 
It  may  well  be  that  the  Greek  drama  arose  out  of 
dance  and  song,  and  that  the  dance  throughout  was  an 
essential  and  plastic  element  in  it.  Even  if  we  reject 

and  an  empty  glass  on  the  other,  can  by  the  contraction  of  the  muscles 
on  the  side  supporting  the  full  glass,  project  the  water  from  it,  so  as  to 
fill  the  empty  glass.  This,  of  course,  is  not  strictly  dancing,  but  it  is  part 
of  the  technique  which  underlies  classic  dancing  and  it  witnesses  to  the 
thoroughness  with  which  the  technical  side  of  Egyptian  dancing  is  still 
cultivated. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


k6 

the  statement  of  Aristotle  that  tragedy  arose  out  of 
the  Dionysian  dithyramb,  the  alternative  suppositions 
(such  as  Ridgeway’s  theory  of  dancing  round  the  tombs 
of  the  dead)  equally  involve  the  same  elements.  It  has 
often  been  pointed  out  that  poetry  in  Greece  demanded 
a  practical  knowledge  of  all  that  could  be  included 
under  “dancing.”  Aeschylus  is  said  to  have  developed 
the  technique  of  dancing  and  Sophocles  danced  in  his 
own  dramas.  In  these  developments,  no  doubt,  Greek 
dancing  tended  to  overpass  the  fundamental  limits  of 
classic  dancing  and  foreshadowed  the  ballet.1 

The  real  germ  of  the  ballet,  however,  is  to  be  found 
in  Rome,  where  the  pantomime  with  its  concerted  and 
picturesque  method  of  expressive  action  was  devel¬ 
oped,  and  Italy  is  the  home  of  Romantic  dancing.  The 
same  impulse  which  produced  the  pantomime  pro¬ 
duced,  more  than  a  thousand  years  later  in  the  same 
Italian  region,  the  modem  ballet.  In  both  cases,  one  is 
inclined  to  think,  we  may  trace  the  influence  of  the 
same  Etruscan  and  Tuscan  race  which  so  long  has  had 
its  seat  there,  a  race  with  a  genius  for  expressive,  dra¬ 
matic,  picturesque  art.  We  see  it  on  the  walls  of  Etrus¬ 
can  tombs  and  again  in  pictures  of  Botticelli  and  his 
fellow  Tuscans.  The  modern  ballet,  it  is  generally  be¬ 
lieved,  had  its  origin  in  the  spectacular  pageants  at 

1  “We  must  learn  to  regard  the  form  of  the  Greek  drama  as  a  dance 
form,”  says  G.  Warre  Cornish  in  an  interesting  article  on  “Greek  Drama 
and  the  Dance”  ( Fortnightly  Review ,  February,  1913),  “a  musical 
symphonic  dance-vision,  through  which  the  history  of  Greece  and  tins 
soul  of  man  are  portrayed.” 


j  THE  ART  OF  DANCING  57 

the  marriage  of  Galeazzo  Visconti,  Duke  of  Milan,  in 
1489.  The  fashion  for  such  performances  spread  to  the 
other  Italian  courts,  including  Florence,  and  Catherine 
de’  Medici,  when  she  became  Queen  of  France,  brought 
the  Italian  ballet  to  Paris.  Here  it  speedily  became 
fashionable.  Kings  and  queens  were  its  admirers  and 
even  took  part  in  it;  great  statesmen  were  its  patrons. 
Before  long,  and  especially  in  the  great  age  of  Louis 
XIV,  it  became  an  established  institution,  still  an  ad¬ 
junct  of  opera  but  with  a  vital  life  and  growth  of  its 
own,  maintained  by  distinguished  musicians,  artists, 
and  dancers.  Romantic  dancing,  to  a  much  greater  ex¬ 
tent  than  what  I  have  called  Classic  dancing,  which  de¬ 
pends  so  largely  on  simple  personal  qualities,  tends  to 
be  vitalised  by  transplantation  and  the  absorption 
of  new  influences,  provided  that  the  essential  basis  of 
technique  and  tradition  is  preserved  in  the  new  devel¬ 
opment.  Lulli  in  the  seventeenth  century  brought 
women  into  the  ballet ;  Camargo  discarded  the  compli¬ 
cated  costumes  and  shortened  the  skirt,  so  rendering 
possible  not  only  her  own  lively  and  vigorous  method, 
but  all  the  freedom  and  airy  grace  of  later  dancing.  It 
was  Noverre  who  by  his  ideas  worked  out  at  Stuttgart, 
and  soon  brought  to  Paris  by  Gaetan  Vestris,  made  the 
ballet  a  new  and  complete  art  form;  this  Swiss-French 
genius  not  only  elaborated  plot  revealed  by  gesture  and 
dance  alone,  but,  just  as  another  and  greater  Swiss- 
French  genius  about  the  same  time  brought  sentiment 
and  emotion  into  the  novel,  he  brought  it  into  the  bal- 


58  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

let.  In  the  French  ballet  of  the  eighteenth  century  a 
very  high  degree  of  perfection  seems  thus  to  have  been 
reached,  while  in  Italy,  where  the  ballet  had  originated, 
it  decayed,  and  Milan,  which  had  been  its  source,  be¬ 
came  the  nursery  of  a  tradition  of  devitalised  tech¬ 
nique  carried  to  the  finest  point  of  delicate  perfection. 
The  influence  of  the  French  school  was  maintained  as  a 
living  force  into  the  nineteenth  century,  —  when  it 
was  renovated  afresh  by  the  new  spirit  of  the  age  and 
Taglioni  became  the  most  ethereal  embodiment  of  the 
spirit  of  the  Romantic  movement  in  a  form  that  was 
genuinely  classic,  —  overspreading  the  world  by  the 
genius  of  a  few  individual  dancers.  When  they  had 
gone,  the  ballet  slowly  and  steadily  declined.  As  it  de¬ 
clined  as  an  art,  so  also  it  declined  in  credit  and  in  pop¬ 
ularity;  it  became  scarcely  respectable  even  to  admire 
dancing.  Thirty  or  forty  years  ago,  those  of  us  who 
still  appreciated  dancing  as  an  art  —  and  how  few  they 
were!  —  had  to  seek  for  it  painfully  and  sometimes  in 
strange  surroundings.  A  recent  historian  of  dancing,  in 
a  book  published  so  lately  as  1906,  declared  that  “the 
ballet  is  now  a  thing  of  the  past,  and,  with  the  modern 
change  of  ideas,  a  thing  that  is  never  likely  to  be  resus¬ 
citated.’ *  That  historian  never  mentioned  Russian 
ballet,  yet  his  book  was  scarcely  published  before  the 
Russian  ballet  arrived  to  scatter  ridicule  over  his  rash 
prophecy  by  raising  the  ballet  to  a  pitch  of  perfection  it 
can  rarely  have  surpassed,  as  an  expressive,  emotional; 
even  passionate  form  of  living  art. 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING  50 

The  Russian  ballet  was  an  offshoot  from  the  French 
ballet  and  illustrates  once  more  the  vivifying  effect  of 
transplantation  on  the  art  of  Romantic  dancing.  The 
Empress  Anna  introduced  it  in  1735  and  appointed  a 
French  ballet-master  and  a  Neapolitan  composer  to 
carry  it  on;  it  reached  a  high  degree  of  technical  per¬ 
fection  during  the  following  hundred  years,  on  the 
traditional  lines,  and  the  principal  dancers  were  all  im¬ 
ported  from  Italy.  It  was  not  until  recent  years  that 
this  firm  discipline  and  these  ancient  traditions  were 
vitalised  into  an  art  form  of  exquisite  and  vivid  beauty 
by  the  influence  of  the  soil  in  which  they  had  slowly 
taken  root.  This  contact,  when  at  last  it  was  effected, 
mainly  by  the  genius  of  Fokine  and  the  enterprise  of 
Diaghilev,  involved  a  kind  of  revolution,  for  its  out¬ 
come,  while  genuine  ballet,  has  yet  all  the  effect  of  de¬ 
licious  novelty.  The  tradition  by  itself  was  in  Russia 
an  exotic  without  real  life,  and  had  nothing  to  give 
to  the  world;  on  the  other  hand,  a  Russian  ballet 
apart  from  that  tradition,  if  we  can  conceive  such  a 
thing,  would  have  been  formless,  extravagant,  bizarre, 
not  subdued  to  any  fine  aesthetic  ends.  What  we  see 
here,  in  the  Russian  ballet  as  we  know  it  to-day,  is  a 
splendid  and  arduous  technical  tradition,  brought  at 
last  —  by  the  combined  skill  of  designers,  composers, 
and  dancers  —  into  real  fusion  with  an  environment 
from  which  during  more  than  a  century  it  had  been 
held  apart;  Russian  genius  for  music,  Russian  feeling 
for  rhythm,  Russian  skill  in  the  use  of  bright  colour, 


50 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


and,  not  least,  the  Russian  orgiastic  temperament,  the 
Russian  spirit  of  tender  poetic  melancholy,  and  the 
general  Slav  passion  for  folk-dancing,  shown  in  other 
branches  of  the  race  also,  Polish,  Bohemian,  Bulgarian, 
and  Servian.  At  almost  the  same  time  what  I  have 
termed  Classic  dancing  was  independently  revived  in 
America  by  Isadora  Duncan ,  bringing  back  what  seemed 
to  be  the  free  naturalism  of  the  Greek  dance,  and  Ruth 
St.  Denis,  seeking  to  discover  and  revitalise  the  secrets 
of  the  old  Indian  and  Egyptian  traditions.  Whenever 
now  we  find  any  restored  art  of  theatrical  dancing,  as 
in  the  Swedish  ballet,  it  has  been  inspired  more  or  less, 
by  an  eclectic  blending  of  these  two  revived  forms,  the 
Romantic  from  Russia,  the  Classic  from  America.  The 
result  has  been  that  our  age  sees  one  of  the  most  splen¬ 
did  movements  in  the  whole  history  of  the  ballet, 

V 

Dancing  as  an  art,  we  may  be  sure,  cannot  die  out,  but 
will  always  be  undergoing  a  rebirth.  Not  merely  as  an 
art,  but  also  as  a  social  custom,  it  perpetually  emerges 
afresh  from  the  soul  of  the  people.  Less  than  a  century 
ago  the  polka  thus  arose,  extemporised  by  the  Bohe¬ 
mian  servant  girl  Anna  Slezakova  out  of  her  own  head 
for  the  joy  of  her  own  heart,  and  only  rendered  a  per¬ 
manent  form,  apt  for  world-wide  popularity,  by  the  acci¬ 
dent  that  it  was  observed  and  noted  down  by  an  artist. 
Dancing  has  for  ever  been  in  existence  as  a  spontaneous 
custom,  a  social  discipline.  Thus  it  is,  finally,  that 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING 


61 


dancing  meets  us,  not  only  as  love,  as  religion,  as  art, 
but  also  as  morals. 

All  human  work,  under  natural  conditions,  is  a  kind 
of  dance.  In  a  large  and  learned  book,  supported  by  an 
immense  amount  of  evidence,  Karl  Bucher  has  argued 
that  work  differs  from  the  dance,  not  in  kind,  but  only 
in  degree,  since  they  are  both  essentially  rhythmic. 
There  is  a  good  reason  why  work  should  be  rhythmic, 
for  all  great  combined  efforts,  the  efforts  by  which 
alone  great  constructions  such  as  those  of  megalithic 
days  could  be  carried  out,  must  be  harmonised.  It  has 
even  been  argued  that  this  necessity  is  the  source  of 
human  speech,  and  we  have  the  so-called  Yo-heave-ho 
theory  of  languages.  In  the  memory  of  those  who  have 
ever  lived  on  a  sailing  ship  —  that  loveliest  of  human 
creations  now  disappearing  from  the  world  —  there 
will  always  linger  the  echo  of  the  chanties  which  sailors 
sang  as  they  hoisted  the  topsail  yard  or  wound  the 
capstan  or  worked  the  pumps.  That  is  the  type  of 
primitive  combined  work,  and  it  is  indeed  difficult  to 
see  how  such  work  can  be  effectively  accomplished 
without  such  a  device  for  regulating  the  rhythmic 
energy  of  the  muscles.  The  dance  rhythm  of  work  has 
thus  acted  socialisingly  in  a  parallel  line  with  the  dance 
rhythms  of  the  arts,  and  indeed  in  part  as  their  in- 
spirer.  The  Greeks,  it  has  been  too  fancifully  sug¬ 
gested,  by  insight  or  by  intuition  understood  this  when 
they  fabled  that  Orpheus,  whom  they  regarded  as  the 
earliest  poet,  was  specially  concerned  with  moving 


62 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


stones  and  trees.  Bucher  has  pointed  out  that  even 
poetic  metre  may  be  conceived  as  arising  out  of  work; 
metre  is  the  rhythmic  stamping  of  feet,  as  in  the  tech¬ 
nique  of  verse  it  is  still  metaphorically  called;  iambics 
and  trochees,  spondees  and  anapaests  and  dactyls,  may 
still  be  heard  among  blacksmiths  smiting  the  anvil  or 
navvies  wielding  their  hammers  in  the  streets.  In  so 
far  as  they  arose  out  of  work,  music  and  singing  and 
dancing  are  naturally  a  single  art.  A  poet  must  al¬ 
ways  write  to  a  tune,  said  Swinburne.  Herein  the 
ancient  ballad  of  Europe  is  a  significant  type.  It  is,  as 
the  name  indicates,  a  dance  as  much  as  a  song,  per¬ 
formed  by  a  singer  who  sang  the  story  and  a  chorus 
who  danced  and  shouted  the  apparently  meaningless 
refrain ;  it  is  absolutely  the  chanty  of  the  sailors  and  is 
equally  apt  for  the  purposes  of  concerted  work.1  Yet 
our  most  complicated  musical  forms  are  evolved  from 
similar  dances.  The  symphony  is  but  a  development 
of  a  dance  suite,  in  the  first  place  folk-dances,  such 
as  Bach  and  Handel  composed.  Indeed  a  dance  still 
lingers  always  at  the  heart  of  music  and  even  the  heart 
of  the  composer.  Mozart,  who  was  himself  an  accom¬ 
plished  dancer,  used  often  to  say,  so  his  wife  stated, 
that  it  was  dancing,  not  music,  that  he  really  cared 
for.  Wagner  believed  that  Beethoven’s  Seventh 

1  it  should  perhaps  be  remarked  that  in  recent  times  it  has  been  denied 
that  the  old  ballads  were  built  up  on  dance  songs.  Miss  Pound,  for  in¬ 
stance,  in  a  book  on  the  subject,  argues  that  they  were  of  aristocratic 
and  not  communal  origin,  which  may  well  be,  though  the  absence  of  the 
dance  element  does  not  seem  to  follow. 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING 


63 

Symphony  —  to  some  of  us  the  most  fascinating  of 
them  and  the  most  purely  musical  —  was  an  apotheosis 
of  the  dance,  and,  even  if  that  belief  throws  no  light  on 
the  intention  of  Beethoven,  it  is  at  least  a  revelation 
of  Wagner's  own  feeling  for  the  dance. 

It  is,  however,  the  dance  itself,  apart  from  the  work 
and  apart  from  the  other  arts,  which,  in  the  opinion 
of  many  to-day,  has  had  a  decisive  influence  in  socialis¬ 
ing,  that  is  to  say  in  moralising,  the  human  species. 
Work  showed  the  necessity  of  harmonious  rhythmic 
cooperation,  but  the  dance  developed  that  rhythmic 
cooperation  and  imparted  a  beneficent  impetus  to  all 
human  activities.  It  was  Grosse,  in  his  “  Beginnings  of 
Art,”  who  first  clearly  set  forth  the  high  social  signifi¬ 
cance  of  the  dance  in  the  creation  of  human  civilisation. 
The  participants  in  a  dance,  as  all  observers  of  savages 
have  noted,  exhibit  a  wonderful  unison;  they  are,  as 
it  were,  fused  into  a  single  being  stirred  by  a  single  im¬ 
pulse.  Social  unification  is  thus  accomplished.  Apart 
from  war,  this  is  the  chief  factor  making  for  social 
solidarity  in  primitive  life;  it  was  indeed  the  best 
training  for  war.  It  has  been  a  twofold  influence;  on 
the  one  hand,  it  aided  unity  of  action  and  method  in 
evolution :  on  the  other,  it  had  the  invaluable  function 
—  for  man  is  naturally  a  timid  animal  —  of  impart¬ 
ing  courage;  the  universal  drum,  as  Louis  Robinson 
remarks,  has  been  an  immense  influence  in  human  af¬ 
fairs.  Even  among  the  Romans,  with  their  highly  de¬ 
veloped  military  system,  dancing  and  war  were  de- 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


64 

finitely  allied ;  the  Salii  constituted  a  college  of  sacred 
military  dancers;  the  dancing  season  was  March,  the 
war-god’s  month  and  the  beginning  of  the  war  season, 
and  all  through  that  month  there  were  dances  in 
triple  measure  before  the  temples  and  round  the  altars, 
with  songs  so  ancient  that  not  even  the  priests  could 
understand  them.  We  may  trace  a  similar  influence 
of  dancing  in  all  the  cooperative  arts  of  life.  All  our 
most  advanced  civilisation,  Grosse  insisted,  is  based 
on  dancing.  It  is  the  dance  that  socialised  man. 

Thus,  in  the  large  sense,  dancing  has  possessed  pecul¬ 
iar  value  as  a  method  of  national  education.  As  civi¬ 
lisation  grew  self-conscious,  this  was  realised.  “One 
may  judge  of  a  king,”  according  to  ancient  Chinese 
maxim,  “by  the  state  of  dancing  during  his  reign.” 
So  also  among  the  Greeks;  it  has  been  said  that  danc¬ 
ing  and  music  lay  at  the  foundation  of  the  whole 
political  and  military  as  well  as  religious  organisation 
of  the  Dorian  states. 

In  the  narrow  sense,  in  individual  education,  the 
great  importance  of  dancing  came  to  be  realised,  even 
at  an  early  stage  of  human  development,  and  still 
more  in  the  ancient  civilisations.  “A  good  education,” 
Plato  declared  in  the  “Laws,”  the  final  work  of  hm 
old  age,  “consists  in  knowing  how  to  sing  and  dance 
well.”  And  in  our  own  day  one  of  the  keenest  and 
most  enlightened  of  educationists  has  lamented  the 
decay  of  dancing;  the  revival  of  dancing,  Stanley  Hall 
declares,  is  imperatively  needed  to  give  poise  to  the 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING 


65 


nerves,  schooling  to  the  emotions,  strength  to  the  will, 
and  to  harmonise  the  feelings  and  the  intellect  with  the 
body  which  supports  them. 

It  can  scarcely  be  said  that  these  functions  of  danc¬ 
ing  are  yet  generally  realised  and  embodied  afresh  in 
education.  For,  if  it  is  true  that  dancing  engendered 
morality,  it  is  also  true  that  in  the  end,  by  the  irony  of 
fate,  morality,  grown  insolent,  sought  to  crush  its  own 
parent,  and  for  a  time  succeeded  only  too  well.  Four 
centuries  ago  dancing  was  attacked  by  that  spirit,  in 
England  called  Puritanism,  which  was  then  spread 
over  the  greater  part  of  Europe,  just  as  active  in 
Bohemia  as  in  England,  and  which  has,  indeed,  been 
described  as  a  general  onset  of  developing  Urbanism 
against  the  old  Ruralism.  It  made  no  distinction  be¬ 
tween  good  and  bad,  nor  paused  to  consider  what 
would  come  when  dancing  went.  So  it  was  that,  as 
Remy  de  Gourmont  remarks,  the  drinking-shop  con¬ 
quered  the  dance,  and  alcohol  replaced  the  violin. 

But  when  we  look  at  the  function  of  dancing  in  life 
from  a  higher  and  wider  standpoint,  this  episode  in  its 
history  ceases  to  occupy  so  large  a  place.  The  con¬ 
quest  over  dancing  has  never  proved  in  the  end  a  mat¬ 
ter  for  rejoicing,  even  to  morality,  while  an  art  which 
has  been  so  intimately  mixed  with  all  the  finest  and 
deepest  springs  of  life  has  always  asserted  itself  afresh. 
For  dancing  is  the  loftiest,  the  most  moving,  the  most 
beautiful  of  the  arts,  because  it  is  no  mere  translation 
or  abstraction  from  life;  it  is  life  itself.  It  is  the  onl> 


66 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


art,  as  Rahel  Varnhagen  said,  of  which  we  ourselves* 
are  the  stuff.  Even  if  we  are  not  ourselves  dancers, 
but  merely  the  spectators  of  the  dance,  we  are  still  — • 
according  to  that  Lippsian  doctrine  of  Einftihlung  or 
“empathy”  by  Groos  termed  “the  play  of  inner 
imitation”  —  which  here,  at  all  events,  we  may  accept 
as  true  —  feeling  ourselves  in  the  dancer  who  is  manh 
festing  and  expressing  the  latent  impulses  of  our  own 
being. 

It  thus  comes  about  that,  beyond  its  manifold 
practical  significance,  dancing  has  always  been  felt  to 
possess  also  a  symbolic  significance.  Marcus  Aurelius 
was  accustomed  to  regard  the  art  of  life  as  like  the 
dancer’s  art,  though  that  Imperial  Stoic  could  not  re¬ 
sist  adding  that  in  some  respects  it  was  more  like  the 
wrestler’s  art.  “  I  doubt  not  yet  to  make  a  figure  in  the 
great  Dance  of  Life  that  shall  amuse  the  spectators  in 
the  sky,”  said,  long  after,  Blake,  in  the  same  strenuous 
spirit.  In  our  own  time,  Nietzsche,  from  first  to  last, 
showed  himself  possessed  by  the  conception  of  the  art 
of  life  as  a  dance,  in  which  the  dancer  achieves  the 
rhythmic  freedom  and  harmony  of  his  soul  beneath 
the  shadow  of  a  hundred  Damoclean  swords.  He  said 
the  same  thing  of  his  style,  for  to  him  the  style  and  the 
man  were  one:  “My  style,”  he  wrote  to  his  intimate 
friend  Rohde,  “is  a  dance.”  “Every  day  I  count 
wasted,”  he  said  again,  “in  which  there  has  been  no 
dancing.”  The  dance  lies  at  the  beginning  of  art,  and 
we  find  it  also  at  the  end.  The  first  creators  of  civi- 


THE  ART  OF  DANCING  67 

lisation  were  making  the  dance,  and  the  philosopher 
of  a  later  age,  hovering  over  the  dark  abyss  of  insanity, 
with  bleeding  feet  and  muscles  strained  to  the  breaking 
point,  still  seems  to  himself  to  be  weaving  the  maze  of 

the  dance. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  ART  OF  THINKING 

I 

Herbert  Spencer  pointed  out,  in  his  early  essay  on 
“The  Genesis  of  Science,”  that  science  arose  out  of 
art,  and  that  even  yet  the  distinction  is  “purely  con¬ 
ventional,”  for  “it  is  impossible  to  say  when  art  ends 
and  science  begins.”  Spencer  was  here  using  “art”  in 
the  fundamental  sense  according  to  which  all  practice 
is  of  the  nature  of  art.  Yet  it  is  of  interest  to  find  a 
thinker  now  commonly  regarded  as  so  prosaic  assert¬ 
ing  a  view  which  to  most  prosaic  people  seems  fanciful. 
To  the  ordinary  solid  man,  to  any  would-be  apostle  of 
common  sense,  science  —  and  by  “science”  he  usually 
means  applied  science  —  seems  the  exact  opposite  of 
the  vagaries  and  virtuosities  that  the  hard-headed 
homme  moyen  sensuel  is  accustomed  to  look  upon  as 
“art.” 

Yet  the  distinction  is  modern.  In  classic  times  there 
was  no  such  distinction.  The  “  sciences  ”  —  reason¬ 
ably,  as  we  may  now  see,  and  not  fancifully  as  was 
afterwards  supposed  —  were  “the  arts  of  the  mind.” 
In  the  Middle  Ages  the  same  liberal  studies  —  gram¬ 
mar,  logic,  geometry,  music,  and  the  rest  —  could  be 
spoken  of  either  as  “sciences”  or  as  “arts,”  and  for 
Roger  Bacon,  who  in  the  thirteenth  century  was  so 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


69 


genuine  a  man  of  science,  every  branch  of  study  or 
learning  was  a  “scientia.”  I  am  inclined  to  think  that 
it  was  the  Mathematical  Renaissance  of  the  seven¬ 
teenth  century  which  introduced  the  undue  emphasis 
on  the  distinction  between  “science”  and  “art.” 
“All  the  sciences  are  so  bound  together,”  wrote 
Descartes,  the  banner-bearer  of  that  Renaissance,  in 
his  “Regies  pour  la  Direction  de  l’Esprit,”  “that  it  is 
much  easier  to  learn  them  all  at  once  than  to  learn  one 
alone  by  detaching  it  from  the  others.”  He  added  that 
we  could  not  say  the  same  of  the  arts.  Yet  we  might 
perhaps  say  of  arts  and  sciences  that  we  can  only  under¬ 
stand  them  all  together,  and  we  may  certainly  say,  as 
Descartes  proceeded  to  say  of  the  sciences  alone,  that 
they  all  emanate  from  the  same  focus,  however  di¬ 
versely  coloured  by  the  media  they  pass  through  or  the 
objects  they  encounter.  At  that  moment,  however, 
it  was  no  doubt  practically  useful,  however  theoreti¬ 
cally  unsound,  to  overemphasise  the  distinction  be¬ 
tween  “science,”  with  its  new  instrumental  precision, 
and  “art.”1  At  the  same  time  the  tradition  of  the 
old  usage  was  not  completely  put  aside,  and  a  Master 
of  “Arts”  remained  a  master  of  such  sciences  as  the 
directors  of  education  succeeded  in  recognising  until 
the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century.  By  that  time 

1  It  would  not  appear  that  the  pioneers  of  the  Mathematical  Renais¬ 
sance  of  the  twentieth  century  are  inclined  to  imitate  Descartes  in  this 
matter.  Einstein  would  certainly  not,  and  many  apostles  of  physical 
science  to-day  (see,  e.g.,  Professor  Sinithells,  From  a  Modern  University: 
Some  Aims  and  Aspirations  of  Science )  insist  on  the  aesthetic,  imagina¬ 
tive,  and  other  “art”  qualities  of  science. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


70 

the  development  of  the  sciences,  and  especially  of  the 
physical  sciences,  as  “the  discovery  of  truth,”  led  to  a 
renewed  emphasis  on  them  which  resulted  in  the 
practical  restriction  of  the  term  “art”  to  what  are 
ordinarily  called  the  fine  arts.  More  formally,  science 
became  the  study  of  what  were  supposed  to  be  de¬ 
monstrable  and  systematically  classifiable  truths  re¬ 
garding  the  facts  of  the  world;  art  was  separated  off 
as  the  play  of  human  impulses  in  making  things.  Sir 
Sidney  Colvin,  in  the  “Encyclopaedia  Britannica,” 
after  discussing  the  matter  (which  Mill  had  already 
discussed  at  length  in  his  “Logic”  and  decided  that 
the  difference  is  that  Science  is  in  the  Indicative  Mood 
and  Art  in  the  Imperative  Mood),  concluded  that 
science  is  “ordered  knowledge  of  natural  phenomena 
and  of  the  relations  between  them,”  or  that  “Science 
consists  in  knowing,  Art  consists  in  doing.”  Men  of 
science,  like  Sir  E.  Ray  Lankester,  accepted  this  con¬ 
clusion.  That  was  as  far  as  it  was  possible  to  go  in  the 
nineteenth  century. 

But  the  years  pass,  and  the  progress  of  science  itself, 
especially  the  sciences  of  the  mind,  has  upset  this  dis¬ 
tinction.  The  analysis  of  “knowing”  showed  that  it 
was  not  such  a  merely  passive  and  receptive  method  of 
recognising  “truth”  as  scientists  had  innocently  sup¬ 
posed.  This  is  probably  admitted  now  by  the  Realists 
among  philosophers  as  well  as  by  the  Idealists.  Dr. 
Charles  Singer,  perhaps  our  most  learned  historian  of 
science,  now  defines  science,  no  longer  as  a  body  of 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


7i 


organized  knowledge,  but  as  “the  process  which  makes 
knowledge/’  as  “knowledge  in  the  making”;  that  is 
to  say,  “the  growing  edge  between  the  unknown  and 
the  known.”  1  As  soon  as  we  thus  regard  it,  as  a  mak¬ 
ing  process,  it  becomes  one  with  art.  Even  physical 
science  is  perpetually  laying  aside  the  “facts”  which 
it  thought  it  knew,  and  learning  to  replace  them  by 
other  “facts”  which  it  comes  to  know  as  more  satis¬ 
factory  in  presenting  an  intelligible  view  of  the  world. 
The  analysis  of  “knowing”  shows  that  this  is  not  only 
a  legitimate  but  an  inevitable  process.  Such  a  process 
is  active  and  creative.  It  clearly  partakes  at  least  as 
much  of  the  nature  of  “doing”  as  of  “knowing.”  It 
involves  qualities  which  on  another  plane,  sometimes 
indeed  on  the  same  plane,  are  essentially  those  involved 
in  doing.  The  craftsman  who  moulds  conceptions  with 
his  mind  cannot  be  put  in  a  fundamentally  different 
class  from  the  craftsman  who  moulds  conceptions  with 
his  hand,  any  more  than  the  poet  can  be  put  in  a  totally 
different  class  from  the  painter.  It  is  no  longer  possible 
to  deny  that  science  is  of  the  nature  of  art. 

1  C.  Singer.  “What  is  Science?”  British  Medical  Journal ,  25th  June, 
1921.  Singer  refuses  the  name  of  “science”  in  the  strict  sense  to  fields  of 
completely  organised  knowledge  which  have  ceased  growing,  like  human 
anatomy  (though,  of  course,  the  anatomist  still  remains  a  man  of  science 
by  working  outwards  into  adjoining  related  fields),  preferring  to  term  any 
such  field  of  completed  knowledge  a  discipline.  This  seems  convenient 
and  I  should  like  to  regard  it  as  sound.  It  is  not,  however,  compatible 
with  the  old  doctrine  of  Mill  and  Colvin  and  Ray  Lankester,  for  it  ex¬ 
cludes  from  the  field  of  science  exactly  what  they  regarded  as  most 
typically  science,  and  some  one  might  possibly  ask  whether  in  other 
departments,  like  Hellenic  sculpture  or  Sung  pottery,  &  completed  art 
ceases  to  be  art. 


72  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

So  it  is  that  in  the  fundamental  sense,  and  even,  it  will 
have  to  be  added,  in  a  sense  that  comprehends  the  ex¬ 
travagancies  of  wild  variations  from  the  norm,  we  have 
to  recognise  that  the  true  man  of  science  is  an  artist. 
Like  the  lunatic,  the  lover,  the  poet  (as  a  great  physi¬ 
cian,  Sir  William  Osier,  has  said),  the  student  is  “of 
imagination  all  compact.”  It  was  by  his  “wonderful 
imagination,”  it  has  been  well  pointed  out,  that  New¬ 
ton  was  constantly  discovering  new  tracks  and  new 
processes  in  the  region  of  the  unknown.  The  extraor¬ 
dinary  various  life-work  of  Helmholtz,  who  initiated 
the  valuation  of  beauty  on  a  physiological  basis, 
scientifically  precise  as  it  was,  had,  as  Einstein  has 
remarked,  anaesthetic  colouring.  “There  is  no  such 
thing  as  an  unimaginative  scientific  man,”  a  distin¬ 
guished  professor  of  mechanics  and  mathematics  de¬ 
clared  some  years  ago,  and  if  we  are  careful  to  re¬ 
member  that  not  every  man  who  believes  that  his  life 
is  devoted  to  science  is  really  a  “scientific  man,”  that 
statement  is  literally  true.1  It  is  not  only  true  of  the 
scientific  man  in  the  special  sense ;  it  is  also  true  of  the 
philosopher.  In  every  philosopher’s  work,  a  phil¬ 
osophic  writer  has  remarked,  “the  construction  of  a 
complete  system  of  conceptions  is  not  carried  out 
simply  in  the  interests  of  knowledge.  Its  underlying 

1  It  has  often  been  pointed  out  that  the  imaginative  application  of 
science  —  artistic  ideas  like  that  of  the  steam  locomotive,  the  flying- 
jnachine  heavier  than  air,  the  telegraph,  the  telephone,  and  many  others 
—  were  even  at  the  moment  of  their  being  achieved,  elaborately  shown 
to  be  “impossible”  by  men  who  had  been  too  hastily  hoisted  up  to  posi¬ 
tions  of  “scientific”  eminence. 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  73 

motive  is  aesthetic.  It  is  the  work  of  a  creative  art¬ 
ist/*  1  The  intellectual  lives  of  a  Plato  or  a  Dante, 
Professor  Graham  Wallas  from  a  different  standpoint 
has  remarked,  “were  largely  guided  and  sustained  by 
their  delight  in  the  sheer  beauty  of  the  rhythmic  re¬ 
lation  between  law  and  instance,  species  and  indi¬ 
vidual,  or  cause  and  effect.”1  , 

That  remark,  with  its  reference  to  the  laws  and 
rhythm  in  the  universe,  calls  to  mind  the  great  initi¬ 
ator,  so  far  as  our  knowledge  extends  back,  of  scien¬ 
tific  research  in  our  European  world.  Pythagoras  is  a 
dim  figure,  and  there  is  no  need  here  to  insist  unduly 
on  his  significance.  But  there  is  not  the  slightest  doubt 
about  the  nature  of  that  significance  in  its  bearing  on 
the  point  before  us.  Dim  and  legendary  as  he  now 
appears  to  us,  Pythagoras  was  no  doubt  a  real  person, 
born  in  the  sixth  century  before  Christ,  at  Samos,  and 
by  his  association  with  that  great  shipping  centre 
doubtless  enabled  to  voyage  afar  and  glean  the  wisdom 
of  the  ancient  world.  In  antiquity  he  was  regarded, 
Cicero  remarks,  as  the  inventor  of  philosophy,  and 
still  to-day  he  is  estimated  to  be  one  of  the  most 
original  figures,  not  only  of  Greece,  but  the  world. 
Pie  is  a  figure  full  of  interest  from  many  points  of  view, 

1  J.  B.  Baillie,  Studies  hn  Human  Nature  (1921),  p,  221.  This  point 
has  become  familiar  ever  since  F.  A.  Lange  published  his  almost  epoch¬ 
marking  work.  The  History  of  Materialism ,  which  has  made  so  deep  an 
impress  on  many  modern  thinkers  from  Nietzsche  to  Vaihinger;  it  is  in¬ 
deed  a  book  which  can  never  be  forgotten  (1  speak  from  experience)  hf 
any  one  who  read  it  in  youth. 

*  G.  Wailas,  The  Great  Society ,  p.  107. 


74 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


however  veiled  in  mist,  but  he  only  concerns  us  here 
because  he  represents  the  beginning  of  what  we  call 
“ science”  —  that  is  to  say,  measurable  knowledge  at 
its  growing  point-—  and  because  he  definitely  represents 
it  as  arising  out  of  what  we  all  conventionally  recognise 
as  “art,1"  and  as,  indeed,  associated  with  the  spirit  of 
art,  even  its  most  fantastic  forms,  all  the  way.  Pytha¬ 
goras  was  a  passionate  lover  of  music,  and  it  was  thus 
that  he  came  to  make  the  enormously  fruitful  dis¬ 
covery  that  pitch  of  sound  depends  upon  the  length  of 
the  vibrating  chord.  Therein  it  became  clear  that  law 
and  spatial  quantity  ruled  even  in  fields  which  had 
seemed  most  independent  of  quantitative  order.  The 
beginning  of  the  great  science  of  mechanics  was  firmly 
set  up.  The  discovery  was  no  accident.  Even  his 
rather  hostile  contemporary  Heraclitus  said  of  Pytha¬ 
goras  that  he  had  “practised  research  and  inquiry  be¬ 
yond  all  other  men.”  He  was  certainly  a  brilliant 
mathematician ;  he  was,  also,  not  only  an  astronomer, 
but  the  first,  so  far  as  we  know,  to  recognise  that  the 
earth  is  a  sphere,  —  so  setting  up  the  ladder  which  was 
to  reach  at  last  to  the  Copemican  conception,  — 
while  his  followers  took  the  further  step  of  affirming 
that  the  earth  was  not  the  centre  of  our  cosmic  system, 
but  concentrically  related.  So  that  Pythagoras  may 
not  only  be  called  the  Father  of  Philosophy,  but,  with 
better  right  the  Father  of  Science  in  the  modern  ex¬ 
act  sense.  Yet  he  remained  fundamentally  an  artist 
even  in  the  conventional  sense.  His  free  play  of  irn- 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  75 

agination  and  emotion,  his  delight  in  the  ravishing 
charm  of  beauty  and  of  harmony,  however  it  may 
sometimes  have  led  him  astray,  —  and  introduced 
the  reverence  for  Number  which  so  long  entwined 
fancy  too  closely  with  science,  —  yet,  as  Gomperz 
puts  it,  gave  soaring  wings  to  the  power  of  his  severe 
reason.1 

One  other  great  dim  figure  of  early  European  an¬ 
tiquity  shares  with  Pythagoras  the  philosophic  domi¬ 
nance  over  our  world,  and  that  is  the  Platonic  Socrates, 
or,  as  we  might  perhaps  say,  the  Socratic  Plato.  And 
here,  too,  we  are  in  the  presence  of  a  philosopher,  if 
not  a  scientist,  who  was  a  supreme  artist.  Here  again, 
also,  we  encounter  a  legendary  figure  concealing  a  more 
or  less  real  human  person.  But  there  is  a  difference. 
While  all  are  agreed  that,  in  Pythagoras  we  have  a 
great  and  brilliant  figure  dimly  seen,  there  are  many 
who  consider  that  in  Socrates  we  have  a  small  and  dim 
figure  grown  great  and  brilliant  in  the  Platonic  medium 
through  which  alone  he  has  been  really  influential  in 
our  world,  for  without  Plato  the  name  of  Socrates 
would  have  scarcely  been  mentioned.  The  problem 
of  the  Pythagorean  legend  may  be  said  to  be  settled. 
But  the  problem  of  the  Socratic  legend  is  still  under 
discussion.  We  cannot,  moreover,  quite  put  it  aside 
as  merely  of  academic  interest,  for  its  solution,  if  ever 
reached,  would  touch  that  great  vital  problem  of  art 

1  Gomperz,  Greek  Thinkers ,  voL  I,  chap,  m,  where  will  be  kruad  . 
Attractive  account  of  Pythagoras'  career  and  poisitiosa. 


76  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

in  the  actual  world  with  which  we  are  here  throughout 

concerned. 

If  one  examines  any  large  standard  history  of  Greece, 
like  Grote’s  to  mention  one  of  the  oldest  and  best, 
one  is  fairly  sure  to  find  a  long  chapter  on  the  life  of 
Socrates.  Such  a  chapter  is  inserted,  without  apology, 
"without  explanation,  without  compunction,  as  a  matter 

course,  in  a  so-called  “history,”  and  nearly  every 
one,  even  to-day,  still  seems  to  take  it  as  a  matter  of 
course.  Few  seem  to  possess  the  critical  and  analytical 
mind  necessary  for  the  examination  of  the  documents 
on  which  the  “history”  rests.  If  they  approached  this 
chapter  in  a  questioning  spirit,  they  might  perhaps 
discover  that  it  was  not  until  about  half  a  century  after 
the  time  of  the  real  Socrates  that  any  “historical” 
evidence  for  the  existence  of  our  legendary  Socrates 
begins  to  appear.1  Few  people  seem  to  realise  that 
even  of  Plato  himself  we  know  nothing  certain  that 


1  Always,  it  may  perhaps  be  noted  in  passing,  it  seems  to  have  been 
difficult  for  the  sober  and  solemn  Northerner,  especially  of  England,  to 
enter  into  the  Greek  spirit,  all  the  more  since  that  spirit  was  only  the 
spirit  of  a  sprinkling  of  people  amid  a  hostile  mass  about  as  unlike  any¬ 
thing  we  conventionally  call  “Greek”  as  could  well  be  imagined,  so  that, 
as  £lie  Faure,  the  historian  of  art,  has  lately  remarked,  Greek  art  is  a 
biological  “monstrosity.”  (Yet,  I  would  ask,  might  we  not  say  the  same 
of  France  or  of  England?)  That  is  why  it  is  usually  so  irritating  to  read 
books  written  about  the  Greeks  by  barbarians;  they  slur  over  or  ignore 
what  they  do  not  like  and,  one  suspects,  they  instinctively  misinterpret 
what  they  think  they  do  like.  Better  even  the  most  imperfect  knowledge 
of  a  few  original  texts,  better  even  only  a  few  days  on  the  Acropolis,  than 
the  second-hand  opinions  of  other  people.  And  if  we  must  have  a  book 
about  the  Greeks,  there  is  always  Athenaeus,  much  nearer  to  them  in 
time  and  in  spirit,  with  all  his  gossip,  than  any  Northern  barbarian,  and 
an  everlasting  delight. 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


77 


could  not  be  held  in  a  single  sentence.  The  “biogra¬ 
phies”  of  Plato  began  to  be  written  four  hundred  year?? 
after  his  death.  It  should  be  easy  to  estimate  their 
value. 

There  are  three  elements  —  one  of  them  immeasur¬ 
ably  more  important  than  the  other  two  —  of  which 
the  composite  portrait  of  our  modern  Socrates  is  made 
up:  Xenophon,  Plato,  the  dramatists.  To  the  con¬ 
tribution  furnished  by  the  first,  not  much  weight  is 
usually  attached.  Yet  it  should  really  have  been 
regarded  as  extremely  illuminating.  It  suggests 
that  the  subject  of  “Socrates”  was  a  sort  of  school 
exercise,  useful  practice  in  rhetoric  or  in  dialectics. 
The  very  fact  that  Xenophon’s  Socrates  was  so  remi¬ 
niscent  of  his  creator  ought  to  have  been  instruc¬ 
tive.1  It  has,  however,  taken  scholars  some  time  to 
recognise  this,  and  Karl  Joel,  who  spent  fifteen  of  the 

1  Along  another  line  it  should  have  been  clear  that  the  dialogues  of  the 
philosophers  were  drama  and  not  history.  It  would  appear  (Croiset, 
Litterature  Grecque,  vol.  hi,  pp.  448  et  seq.)  that  with  Epicharmus  of  Cos, 
who  was  settled  in  Megara  at  the  beginning  of  the  fifth  century,  phil¬ 
osophic  comedy  flourished  brilliantly  at  Syracuse,  and  indeed  fragment's 
of  his  formal  philosophic  dialogue  survive.  Thus  it  is  suggested  that 
Athenian  comedy  and  sophistic  prose  dialogues  may  be  regarded  as  tw* 
branches  drawn  from  the  ancient  prototype  of  such  Syracusan  comedy, 
itself  ultimately  derived  from  Ionian  philosophy.  It  is  worth  noting,  I 
might  add,  that  when  we  first  hear  of  the  Platonic  dialogues  they  were 
being  grouped  in  trilogies  and  tetralogies  like  the  Greek  dramas;  that 
indicates,  at  all  events,  what  their  earliest  editors  thought  about  them. 
If  is  also  interesting  to  note  that  the  writer  of,  at  the  present  moment, 
the  latest  handbook  to  Plato,  Professor  A.  E.  Taylor  {Plato,  1922,  pp.  32- 
33),  regards  the  “Socrates”  of  Plato  as  no  historical  figure,  not  even 
a  mask  of  Plato  himself,  but  simply  “the  hero  of  the  Platonic  drama,” 
which  we  have  to  approach  in  much  the  same  way  as  the  work  of  “a 
great  dramatist  or  novelist.” 


78 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


best  years  of  his  life  over  the  Xenophontic  Socrates, 
to  discover  that  the  figure  was  just  as  much  a  fiction 
as  the  Platonic  Socrates,  has  lately  confessed  that  he 
thinks  those  years  rather  wasted.  It  might  have  been 
clear  earlier  that  what  Plato  had  done  was  really  just  the 
same  thing  so  far  as  method  was  concerned,  though 
a  totally  different  thing  in  result  because  done  by  the 
most  richly  endowed  of  poet-philosophers,  the.  most 
consummate  of  artists.  For  that  is  probably  how  we 
ought  to  regard  Plato,  and  not,  like  some,  as  merely  a 
great  mystiffcator.  It  is  true  that  Plato  was  the  master 
of  irony,  and  that  “  irony,”  in  its  fundamental  mean¬ 
ing,  is,  as  Gomperz  points  out,  “  pleasure  in  mystify¬ 
ing.”  But  while  Plato's  irony  possesses  a  significance 
which  we  must  always  keep  before  us,  it  is  yet  only  one 
of  the  elements  of  his  vast  and  versatile  mind. 

It  is  to  the  third  of  these  sources  that  some  modem 
investigators  are  now  inclined  to  attach  primary  signi¬ 
ficance.  It  was  on  the  stage  —  in  the  branch  of  drama 
that  kept  more  closely  in  touch  with  life  than  that 
which  had  fallen  into  the  hands  of  the  prose  dialecti¬ 
cians  and  rhetoricians  —  that  we  seem  to  find  the 
shadow  of  the  real  Socrates.  But  he  was  not  the  Socra¬ 
tes  of  the  dramatic  dialogues  of  Plato  or  even  of  Xeno¬ 
phon;  he  was  a  minor  Sophist,  an  inferior  Diogenes,  yet 
a  remarkable  figure,  arresting  and  disturbing,  whose 
idiosyncrasies  were  quite  perceptible  to  the  crowd.  It 
was  an  original  figure,  hardly  the  embodiment  of  a 
turning-point  in  philosophy,  but  fruitful  of  great  possi- 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


79 

bilities,  so  that  we  could  hardly  be  surprised  if  the  mas¬ 
ter  of  philosophic  drama  took  it  over  from  real  life  and 
the  stage  for  his  own  purposes. 

To  make  clear  to  myself  the  possible  way  —  I  am  far 
from  asserting  it  was  the  actual  way  —  in  which  our 
legendary  Socrates  arose,  I  sometimes  think  of  Chid- 
ley.  Chidley  was  an  Australian  Sophist  and  Cynic,  in 
the  good  sense  of  both  these  words,  and  without  doubt, 
it  seems  to  me,  the  most  original  and  remarkable  figure 
that  has  ever  appeared  in  Australia,  of  which,  however, 
he  was  not  a  native,  though  he  spent  nearly  his  whole 
life  there.  He  was  always  poor,  and  like  most  philoso¬ 
phers  he  was  born  with  a  morbid  nervous  disposition, 
though  he  acquired  a  fine  and  robust  frame.  He  was 
liable  not  only  to  the  shock  of  outward  circumstances 
but  of  inward  impulses;  these  he  had  in  the  past  often 
succumbed  to,  and  only  slowly  and  painfully  gained 
the  complete  mastery  over  as  he  gained  possession  of 
his  own  philosophy.  For  all  his  falls,  which  he  felt 
acutely,  as  Augustine  and  Bunyan  as  well  as  Rousseau 
felt  such  lapses.,  there  was  in  him  a  real  nobility,  an 
even  ascetic  firmness  and  purity  of  character.  I  never 
met  him,  but  I  knew  him  more  intimately,  perhaps, 
than  those  who  came  in  contact  with  him.  For  many 
years  I  was  in  touch  with  him,  and  his  last  letter  was 
written  shortly  before  his  death;  he  always  felt  I  ought 
to  be  persuaded  of  the  truth  he  had  to  reveal  and  never 
quite  understood  my  sympathetic  attitude  of  scepti¬ 
cism.  He  had  devoured  all  the  philosophic  literature 


So 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


he  could  lay  hold  of,  but  his  philosophy  —  in  the  Greek 
sense,  as  a  way  of  life,  and  not  in  our  modern  sense  as  a 
system  of  notions  —  was  his  own:  a  new  vision  of  Na¬ 
ture’s  simplicity  and  wholeness,  only  new  because  it 
had  struck  on  a  new  sensibility  and  sometimes  in  ex¬ 
cessive  and  fantastic  ways,  but  he  held  his  faith  with 
unbending  devotion,  and  never  ceased  to  believe  that' 
all  would  accept  the  vision  when  once  they  beheld  it. 
So  he  went  about  the  streets  in  Sydney,  clad  (as  a  con¬ 
cession  to  public  feeling)  in  bathing  drawers,  finding 
anywhere  he  could  the  Stoa  which  might  serve  for  him, 
to  argue  and  discuss,  among  all  who  were  willing,  with 
eager  faith,  keen  mind,  and  pungent  speech.  A  few 
were  won,  but  most  were  disturbed  and  shocked.  The 
police  persistently  harassed  him;  they  felt  bound  to  in¬ 
terfere  with  what  seemed  such  an  outrage  on  the  prim 
decency  of  the  streets;  and  as  he  quietly  persisted  in 
following  his  own  course,  and  it  was  hard  to  bring  any 
serious  charge  against  him,  they  called  in  the  aid  of  the 
doctors,  and  henceforth  he  was  in  and  out  of  the  asy¬ 
lum  instead  of  the  prison.  No  one  need  be  blamed;  it 
was  nobody’s  fault;  if  a  man  transgresses  the  ordinary 
respectable  notions  of  decency,  he  must  be  a  criminal, 
and  if  he  is  not  a  criminal,  he  must  be  a  lunatic;  the 
social  organisation  takes  no  account  of  philosophers ; 
the  philosophic  Hipparchia  and  her  husband  must  not 
nowadays  consummate  their  marriage  in  public,  and  our 
modern  philosophers  meekly  agree  that  philosophy  is 
to  have  nothing  to  do  with  a  life.  Every  one  in  the 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  81 

case  seems  to  have  behaved  with  due  conventional 
propriety,  just  as  every  one  behaved  around  the  death* 
bed  of  Tolstoy’s  Ivan  Hitch.  It  was  Chidley’s  death¬ 
bed  they  were  preparing,  and  he  knew  itr  but  he  un¬ 
flinchingly  grasped  the  cup  they  held  out  to  him  and 
drank  it  to  the  dregs.  He  felt  he  could  do  no  other. 
There  was  no  fabled  hemlock  in  it,  but  it  was  just  as 
deadly  as  though  it  had  been  accompanied  by  all  the 
dramatic  symbolisation  of  a  formal  condemnation  to 
death,  such  as  had  really  been  recorded  (Plato  well 
knew)  in  old  Athenian  annals.  There  was  no  Plato  in 
Sydney.  But  if  there  had  been,  it  is  hard  to  conceive 
any  figure  more  fit  for  the  ends  of  his  transforming  art. 
Through  that  inspiring  medium  the  plebeian  Sophist 
and  Cynic,  while  yet  retaining  something  of  the  asper¬ 
ity  of  his  original  shape,  would  have  taken  on  a  new 
glory,  his  bizarreries  would  have  been  spiritualised  and 
his  morbidities  become  the  signs  of  mystic  possession, 
his  fate  would  have  appeared  as  consecrated  in  form  as 
it  genuinely  was  in  substance,  he  would  have  been  the 
mouthpiece,  not  only  of  the  truths  he  really  uttered, 
but  of  a  divine  eloquence  on  the  verge  of  which  he  had 
in  real  life  only  trembled,  and,  like  Socrates  in  the 
hands  of  Plato,  he  would  have  passed,  as  all  the  finest 
philosophy  passes  at  last,  into  music.1  So  in  the  end 
Chidley  would  have  entered  modem  history,  just  as 

1  He  had  often  been  bidden  in  dreams  to  make  music,  said  the  Platonic 
Socrates  in  Plnado ,  and  he  had  imagined  that  that  was  meant  to  en¬ 
courage  him  in  the  pursuit  of  philosophy,  “  whid  is  the  noblest  and  best 
os  music.” 


8  2 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


Socrates  entered  ancient  history,  the  Saint  and  Martyr 
of  Philosophy.1 

If  it  should  so  be  that,  as  we  learn  to  see  him  truly, 
the  figure  of  the  real  Socrates  must  diminish  in  magni¬ 
tude,  then  —  and  that  is  the  point  which  concerns  us 
here  —  the  glory  of  the  artist  who  made  him  what  he 
has  become  for  us  is  immensely  enhanced.  No  longer 
the  merely  apt  and  brilliant  disciple  of  a  great  master, 
he  becomes  himself  master  and  lord,  the  radiant  cre¬ 
ator  of  the  chief  figure  in  European  philosophy,  the 
most  marvellous  artist  the  world  has  ever  known.  So 
that  when  we  look  back  at  the  spiritual  history  of 
Europe,  it  may  become  possible  to  say  that  its  two 
supreme  figures,  the  Martyr  of  Philosophy  and  the 
Martyr  of  Religion,  were  both  —  however  real  the 
two  human  persons  out  of  which  they  were  formed  — • 
the  work  of  man’s  imagination.  For  there,  on  the  one 
hand,  we  see  the  most  accomplished  of  European 
thinkers,  and  on  the  other  a  little  band  of  barbarians, 
awkwardly  using  just  the  same  Greek  language,  work¬ 
ing  with  an  unconscious  skill  which  even  transcends  all 
that  conscious  skill  could  have  achieved,  yet  both  bear¬ 
ing  immortal  witness  to  the  truth  that  the  human  soul 
only  lives  truly  in  art  and  can  only  be  ruled  through 
art.  So  it  is  that  in  art  lies  the  solution  of  the  conflicts 

1  In  discussing  Socrates  I  have  made  some  use  of  Professor  Dupreel’a 
remarkable  book,  La  Legends  Socratique  (1922).  Dupreel  himself,  with 
a  little  touch  of  irony,  recommends  a  careful  perusal  of  the  beautiful  and 
monumental  works  erected  by  Zeller  and  Grote  and  Gomperz  to  the 
honour  of  Socrates. 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


®3 

of  philosophy.  There  we  see  Realism,  or  the  discovery 
of  things,  one  with  Idealism,  or  the  creation  of  things. 
Art  is  the  embodied  harmony  of  their  conflict.  That 
could  not  be  more  exquisitely  symbolised  than  by 
these  two  supreme  figures  in  the  spiritual  life  of 
Europe,  the  Platonic  Socrates  and  the  Gospel  Jesus, 
both  alike  presented  to  us,  it  is  so  significant  to  ob¬ 
serve,  as  masters  of  irony. 

There  has  never  again  been  so  great  an  artist  in 
philosophy,  so  supreme  a  dramatist,  as  Plato.  But  in 
later  times  philosophers  themselves  have  often  been 
willing  to  admit  that  even  if  they  were  not,  like  Plato, 
dramatists,  there  was  poetry  and  art  in  their  vocation. 
“One  does  not  see  why  the  sense  for  Philosophy 
should  be  more  generally  diffused  than  that  for 
poetry,”  remarked  Schellin-g,  evidently  regarding  them 
as  on  the  same  plane.  F.  A.  Lange  followed  with  his 
memorable  “History  of  Materialism,”  in  which  the 
conception  of  philosophy  as  a  poetic  art  was  clearly  set 
forth.  “  Philosophy  is  pure  art,”  says  in  our  own  days 
a  distinguished  thinker  who  is  in  especially  close  touch 
with  the  religious  philosophy  of  the  East.  “The 
thinker  works  with  laws -of  thought  and  scientific  facts 
in  just  the  same  sense  as  the  musical  composer  with 
tones.  He  must  find  accords,  he  must  think  out  se¬ 
quences,  he  must  set  the  part  in  a  necessary  relation  to 
the  whole.  But  for  that  he  needs  art.” 1  Bergson  regards 

1  Count  Hermann  Keyserling,  Philosophic  als  Kunst  (1920),  p.  2.  He 
associates  this  with  the  need  for  a  philosophy  to  possess  a  subjective 


84  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

philosophy  as  an  art,  and  Croce,  the  more  than  rival 
of  Bergson  in  popular  esteem,  and  with  interesting 
points  of  contact  with  the  French  philosopher,  though 
his  standpoint  is  so  different,  has  repeatedly  pointed 
out  —  as  regards  Nietzsche,  for  instance,  and  even  as 
regards  a  philosopher  to  whom  he  is  so  closely  related 
as  Hegel  —  that  we  may  read  philosophy  for  its  poetic 
rather  than  its  historic  truth.  Croce’s  position  in  this 
matter  is  not,  indeed,  easy  to  state  quite  simply.  He 
includes  aesthetics  in  philosophy,  but  he  would  not 
regard  philosophy  as  an  art.  For  him  art  is  the  first 
and  lowest  stratum  in  the  mind,  not  in  rank,  but  in 
order,  and  on  it  the  other  strata  are  laid  and  combine 
with  it.  Or,  as  he  elsewhere  says,  “  art  is  the  root  of  our 
whole  theoretic  life.  Without  root  there  can  be  neither 
flower  nor  fruit.”  1  But  for  Croce  art  is  not  itself 
flower  or  fruit.  The  “  Concept”  and  other  abstrac¬ 
tions  have  to  be  brought  in  before  Croce  is  satisfied 
that  he  has  attained  reality.  It  may,  perhaps,  indeed, 
be  permitted,  even  to  an  admirer  of  the  skill  with  which 
Croce  spreads  out  such  wide  expanses  of  thought,  to 
suggest  that,  in  spite  of  his  anxiety  to  keep  close  to  the 
concrete,  he  is  not  therein  always  successful,  and  that 
he  tends  to  move  in  verbal  circles,  as  may  perhaps  hap¬ 
pen  to  a  philosopher  who  would  reduce  the  philosophy 

personal  character,  without  which  it  can  have  no  value,  indeed  no  con¬ 
tent  at  all. 

:  Croce,  Problem i  d ’  Estctica,  p.  15.  I  have  to  admit,  for  myself,  that, 
while  admiring  the  calm  breadth  of  Croce’s  wide  outlook,  it  is  sometimes 
my  misfortune,  in  spite  of  myself,  when  I  go  to  his  works,  to  play  the 
vfc&rt  of  a  Balaam  &  rcbours.  I  go  forth  to  bless:  and,  somehow,  I  cutsr 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  85 

of  art  to  the  philosophy  of  language.  But,  however 
that  may  be,  it  is  a  noteworthy  fact  that  the  close 
relationship  of  art  and  philosophy  is  admitted  by  the 
two  most  conspicuous  philosophers  of  to-day,  raised  to 
popular  eminence  in  spite  of  themselves,  the  Philoso¬ 
pher  of  Other-worldliness  and  the  Philosopher  of 
This-worldliness. 

If  we  turn  to  England,  we  find  that,  in  an  age  and  a 
land  wherein  it  was  not  so  easy  to  make  the  assertion 
as  it  has  now  more  generally  become,  Sir  Leslie 
Stephen,  in  harmony,  whether  or  not  he  knew  it,  with 
F.  A.  Lange,  wrote  to  Lord  Morley  (as  he  later  be¬ 
came)  in  the  last  century:  “  I  think  that  a  philosophy 
is  really  made  more  of  poetry  than  of  logic;  and  the 
real  value  of  both  poetry  and  philosophy  is  not  the 
pretended  reasoning,  but  the  exposition  in  one  form  or 
other  of  a  certain  view  of  life.”  It  is,  we  see,  just  what 
they  have  all  been  saying,  and  if  it  is  true  of  men  of 
science  and  philosophers,  who  are  the  typical  represen¬ 
tatives  of  human  thinking,  it  is  even  true  of  every  man 
on  earth  who  thinks,  ever  since  the  day  when  conscious 
thinking  began.  The  world  is  an  unrelated  mass  of 
impressions,  as  it  first  strikes  our  infant  senses,  failing 
at  random  on  the  sensory  mechanism,  and  all  appear¬ 
ing  as  it  were  on  the  same  plane.  For  an  infant  the 
moon  is  no  farther  away  than  his  mother’s  breast,  even 
though  he  possesses  an  inherited  mental  apparatus 
fitted  to  coordinate  and  distinguish  the  two.  It  is  only 
when  we  begin  to  think,  that  we  can  arrange  these 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


SC 

unrelated  impressions  into  intelligible  groups,  and 
thinking  is  thus  of  the  nature  of  art.1 

All  such  art,  moreover,  may  yet  be  said  to  be  an 
invention  of  fictions.  That  great  and  fundamental 
truth,  which  underlies  so  much  modern  philosophy, 
has  been  expounded  in  the  clearest  and  most  detailed 
manner  by  Hans  Vaihinger  in  his  “Philosophic  des 
Als  Ob.” 


n 

Hans  Vaihinger  is  still  little  known  in  England;2  and 
that  is  the  more  remarkable  as  he  has  always  been 
strongly  attached  to  English  thought,  of  which  his 
famous  book  reveals  an  intimate  knowledge.  In  early 
life  he  had  mixed  much  with  English  people,  for  whom 
he  has  a  deep  regard,  and  learnt  to  revere,  not  only 
Darwin,  but  Hume  and  J.  S.  Mill,  who  exerted  a 

1  James  Hinton,  a  pioneer  in  so  many  fields,  clearly  saw  that  thinking 
is  really  an  art  fifty  years  ago.  “Thinking  is  no  mere  mechanical  proc¬ 
ess,”  he  wrote  ( Chapters  on  the  Art  of  Thinking ,  pp.  43  et  seq.),  “it  is  a 
great  Art,  the  chief  of  all  the  Arts.  .  .  .  Those  only  can  be  called  thinkers 
who  have  a  native  gift,  a  special  endowment  for  the  work,  and  have  been 
trained,  besides,  by  assiduous  culture.  And  though  we  continually  as¬ 
sume  that  every  one  is  capable  of  thinking,  do  we  not  all  feel  that  there 
is  somehow  a  fallacy  in  this  assumption?  Do  we  not  feel  that  what  people 
set  up  as  their  ‘reasons’  for  disbelieving  or  believing  are  often  nothing  of 
the  sort?.  .  .  The  Art  faculty  is  Imagination,  the  power  of  seeing  the 
unseen,  the  power  also  of  putting  ourselves  out  of  the  centre,  of  reducing 
ourselves  to  our  true  proportions,  of  truly  using  our  own  impressions. 
And  is  not  this  in  reality  the  chief  element  in  the  work  of  the  thinker?. . . 
Science  is  poetry.” 

*  So  far,  indeed,  as  I  am  aware,  I  was  responsible  for  the  first  English 
account  of  his  work  (outside  philosophical  journals);  it  appeared  in  the 
London  Nation  and  Athcneeum  a  few  years  ago,  and  is  partly  embodied 
in  the  present  chapter. 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  87 

decisive  influence  on  his  own  philosophic  development. 
At  the  beginning  of  his  career  he  projected  a  history  of 
English  philosophy,  but  interest  in  that  subject  was 
then  so  small  in  Germany  that  he  had  regretfully  to 
abandon  his  scheme,  and  was  drawn  instead,  through 
no  active  effort  on  his  part,  to  make  the  study  of  Kant 
the  by-product  of  his  own  more  distinctive  work,  yet  it 
was  a  fitting  study,  for  in  Kant  he  saw  the  germs  of  the 
doctrine  of  the  “as  if,”  that  is  to  say,  the  practical 
significance  of  fiction  in  human  life,  though  that  is 
not  the  idea  traditionally  associated  with  Kant,  who, 
indeed,  was  not  himself  clear  about  it,  while  his  insight 
was  further  darkened  by  his  reactionary  tendencies; 
yet  Vaihinger  found  that  it  really  played  a  large  part 
in  Kant’s  work  and  might  even  be  regarded  as  his 
special  and  personal  way  of  regarding  things;  he  was 

not  so  much  a  metaphysician,  Vaihinger  remarks,  as  a 

% 

metaphorician.  Yet  even  in  his  Kantian  studies  the 
English  influence  was  felt,  for  Vaihinger’s  work  has 
here  been  to  take  up  the  Neo-Kantism  of  F.  A.  Lange 
and  to  develop  it  in  an  empirical  and  positivistic 
direction. 

There  was  evidently  something  in  Vaihinger’s  spirit 
that  allied  him  to  the  English  spirit.  We  may  see  that 
in  his  portrait;  it  is  not  the  face  of  the  philosophic 
dreamer,  the  scholarly  man  of  the  study,  but  the  eager, 
forceful  head  of  the  practical  man  of  action,  the  daring 
adventurer,  the  man  who  seems  made  to  struggle  with 
the  concrete  things  of  the  world,  the  kind  oi  man,  that 


S3 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


is  to  say,  whom  we  consider  peculiarly  English.  That, 
indeed,  is  the  kind  of  man  he  would  have  been ;  that  is 
the  kind  of  life,  a  social  life  full  of  activity  and  of  sport, 
that  he  desired  to  lead.  But  it  was  impossible.  An 
extreme  and  lifelong  short-sightedness  proved  a  handi¬ 
cap  of  which  he  has  never  ceased  to  be  conscious.  So 
it  came  about  that  his  practical  energy  was,  as  it  were, 
sublimated  into  a  philosophy  which  yet  retained  the 
same  forceful  dynamic  quality. 

For  the  rest,  his  origin,  training,  and  vocation  seem 
all  to  have  been  sufficiently  German.  He  came,  like 
many  other  eminent  men,  out  of  a  Swabian  parsonage, 
and  was  himself  intended  for  theology,  only  branching 
off  into  philosophy  after  his  university  career  was  well 
advanced.  At  the  age  of  sixteen  he  was  deeply  influ¬ 
enced,  as  so  many  others  have  been,  by  Herder’s 
“  Ideen  zur  Geschichte  der  Menschheit  ” ;  that  not  only 
harmonised  with  his  own  tendency  at  the  time  towards 
a  mixed  theism  and  pantheism,  but  it  first  planted 
within  him  the  conception  of  evolution  in  human  his¬ 
tory,  proceeding  from  an  animal  origin,  which  became 
a  fundamental  element  of  his  mental  constitution.. 
When  a  year  later  he  came  across  Darwin’s  doctrines 
he  felt  that  he  knew  them  beforehand.  These  influ¬ 
ences  were  balanced  by  that  of  Plato,  through  whose 
“  Ideas”  he  caught  his  first  glimpse  of  an  “As-If 
world.”  A  little  later  the  strenuous  training  of  one  of 
his  teachers  in  the  logical  analysis  of  Latin  syntax, 
especially  in  the  use  of  the  conjunctions,  furnished  the 


TIIE  ART  OF  THINKING 


89 


source  from  which  subsequently  he  drew  that  now 
well-known  phrase.  It  was  in  these  years  that  he 
reached  the  view,  which  he  has  since  definitely  ad¬ 
vocated,  that  philosophy  should  not  be  made  a  sepa¬ 
rate  study,  but  should  become  a  natural  part  and  cor¬ 
ollary  of  every  study,  since  philosophy  cannot  be 
fruitfully  regarded  as  a  discipline  by  itself.  Without 
psychology,  especially,  he  finds  that  philosophy  is 
merely  “  a  methodic  abstraction. ”  A  weighty  influence 
of  these  days  was  constituted  by  the  poems  and  essays 
of  Schiller,  a  Swabian  like  himself,  and,  indeed,  asso¬ 
ciated  with  the  history  of  his  own  family.  Schiller 
was  not  only  an  inspiring  influence,  but  it  was  in 
Schiller’s  saying,  “  Error  alone  is  life,  and  knowledge  is 
death,”  that  he  found  (however  unjustifiably)  the 
first  expression  of  his  own  “  fictionalism,”  while 
Schiller’s  doctrine  of  the  play  impulse  as  the  basis  of 
artistic  creation  and  enjoyment  seemed  the  prophecy 
of  his  own  later  doctrine,  for  in  play  he  saw  later  the 
“as  if”  as  the  kernel  of  aesthetic  practice  and  contem¬ 
plation. 

At  the  age  of  eighteen  Vaihinger  proceeded  to  the 
Swabian  University  of  Tubingen  and  here  was  free  to 
let  his  wide-ranging,  eager  mind  follow  its  own  im¬ 
pulses.  He  revealed  a  taste  for  the  natural  sciences  and 
with  this  the  old  Greek  nature  philosophers,  especially 
Anaximander,  for  the  sake  of  their  anticipations  of 
modern  evolutionary  doctrines.  Aristotle  also  occu¬ 
pied  him,  later  Spinoza,  and,  above  all,  Kant,  though 


90 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


it  was  chiefly  the  metaphysical  antinomies  and  the 
practical  reason  which  fascinated  him.  As  ever,  it  was 
what  made  for  practice  that  seemed  mostly  to  concern 
him.  Schelling,  Hegel,  and  Schleiermacher,  the  official 
German  idealists,  said  nothing  to  him.  He  turned 
from  them  to  Schopenhauer,  and  thence  he  drew  the 
pessimisms,  the  irrationalism,  and  the  voluntarism 
which  became  permanent  features  of  his  system  of 
thought.  The  irrationalism,  as  he  himself  points  out, 
was  completely  opposed  to  all  early  influences  on  him, 
but  it  lay  in  his  own  personal  circumstances.  The  con¬ 
trast  between  his  temperamental  impulse  to  energetic 
practical  action  in  every  direction,  and  the  reserve, 
passivity,  and  isolation  which  myopia  enforced,  seemed 
to  him  absolutely  irrational  and  sharpened  his  vision 
for  all  the  irrationality  of  existence.  So  that  a  philoso¬ 
phy  which,  like  Schopenhauer’s,  truthfully  recognised 
and  allowed  for  the  irrational  element  in  existence 
came  like  a  revelation.  As  to  Vaihinger’s  pessimism, 
that,  as  we  might  expect,  is  hardly  of  what  would 
be  generally  considered  a  pessimistic  character.  It  is 
merely  a  recognition  of  the  fact  that  most  people  are 
over-sanguine  and  thereby  come  to  grief,  whereas  a 
little  touch  of  pessimism  would  have  preserved  them 
from  much  misery.  Long  before  the  Great  War, 
Vaihinger  felt  that  many  Germans  were  over-sanguine 
regarding  the  military  power  of  their  Empire,  and  of 
Germany’s  place  in  the  world,  and  that  such  optimism 
might  easily  conduce  to  war  and  disaster.  In  1911  he 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


even  planned  to  publish  anonymously  in  Switzerland 
a  pamphlet  entitled  “  Finis  Germanise,”  with  the  motto 
“Quos  Deus  vult  perdere,  prius  dementat,”  and  was 
only  prevented  by  a  sudden  development  of  the  eye- 
trouble.  Vaihinger  points  out  that  an  unjustified 
optimism  had  for  a  long  time  past  led  in  the  politics 
of  Germany  —  and  also,  he  might  have  said,  of  the 
countries  later  opposed  to  her  —  to  lack  of  foresight, 
over-haste,  and  arrogance ;  he  might  have  added  that  a 
very  slight  touch  of  pessimism  would  also  have  enabled 
these  countries,  on  both  sides,  to  discover  the  not  very 
remote  truth  that  even  the  victors  in  such  a  contest 
would  suffer  scarcely  less  than  the  conquered.  In  early 
life  Vaihinger  had  playfully  defined  Man  as  a  “species 
of  ape  afflicted  by  megalomania” ;  he  admits  that, 
whatever  truth  lies  behind  the  definition,  the  state¬ 
ment  is  somewhat  exaggerated.  Yet  it  is  certainly 
strange  to  observe,  one  may  comment,  how  many 
people  seem  to  feel  vain  of  their  own  ungratified 
optimism  when  the  place  where  optimism  most  flour¬ 
ishes  is  the  lunatic  asylum.  They  never  seem  to  pause 
to  reflect  on  the  goal  that  lies  ahead  of  them,  though 
there  must  be  few  who  on  looking  back  cannot  perceive 
what  terrible  accidents  they  might  have  foreseen  and 
avoided  by  the  aid  of  a  little  pessimism.  When  the 
gods,  to  ruin  a  man,  first  make  him  mad,  they  do  it, 
almost  invariably,  by  making  him  an  optimist.  One 
might  hazard  the  assertion  that  the  chief  philosophic 
distinction  between  classic  antiquity  and  modem 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


92 

civilisation  is  the  prevalence  in  the  latter  of  a  facile 
optimism;  and  the  fact  that  of  all  ancient  writers  the 
most  popular  in  modern  times  has  been  the  com¬ 
placently  optimistic  (or  really  hedonistic)  Horace  is 
hardly  due  to  his  technical  virtuosity.  He  who  would 
walk  sanely  amid  the  opposing  perils  in  the  path  of 
life  always  needs  a  little  optimism;  he  also  needs  a 
little  pessimism. 

Reference  has  been  made  to  Vaihinger’s  devouring 
appetite  for  knowledge.  This,  indeed,  was  extraordi¬ 
nary,  and  of  almost  universal  range.  There  seem  to 
have  been  few  fields  with  which  he  failed  to  come  in 
touch,  either  through  books  or  by  personal  intercourse 
with  experts.  He  found  his  way  into  all  the  natural 
sciences,  he  was  drawn  to  Greek  archaeology  and  Ger¬ 
man  philosophy;  he  began  the  study  of  Sanscrit  with 
Roth.  Then,  realising  that  he  had  completely  neg¬ 
lected  mathematics,  he  devoted  himself  with  ardour  to 
analytic  geometry  and  infinitesimals,  a  study  which 
later  he  found  philosophically  fruitful.  Finally,  in 
1874,  he  may  be  said  to  have  rounded  the  circle  of  his 
self-development  by  reading  the  just  published  en¬ 
larged  and  much  improved  edition  of  F.  A.  Lange’s 
“History  of  Materialism. ”  Here  he  realised  the  pres¬ 
ence  of  a  spirit  of  the  noblest  order,  equipped  with  the 
widest  culture  and  the  finest  lucidity  of  vision,  the 
keenest  religious  radicalism  combined  with  large- 
hearted  tolerance  and  lofty  moral  equilibrium,  all 
manifested  in  a  completed  master- work.  Moreover, 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


93 


the  standpoint  of  F.  A.  Lange  was  precisely  that 
which  Vaihinger  had  been  independently  struggling 
towards,  for  it  brought  into  view  that  doctrine  of  the 
place  of  fiction  in  life  which  he  had  already  seen  ahead. 
It  is  not  surprising  that  he  should  generously  and 
enthusiastically  acclaim  Lange  as  master  and  leader, 
though  his  subsequent  work  is  his  own,  and  has  carried 
ideas  of  which  Lange  held  only  the  seeds  to  new  and 
fruitful  development.1 

It  was  in  1876-77  that  Vaihinger  wrote  his  book,  a 
marvellous  achievement  for  so  youthful  a  thinker,  for 
he  was  then  only  about  twenty-five  years  of  age.  A 
final  revision  it  never  underwent,  and  there  remain 
various  peculiarities  about  the  form  into  which  it  is 
cast.  The  serious  failure  in  eyesight  seems  to  have 
been  the  main  reason  for  delaying  the  publication  of  a 
work  which  the  author  felt  to  be  too  revolutionary  to 
put  forth  in  an  imperfect  form.  He  preferred  to  leave 
it  for  posthumous  publication. 

But  the  world  was  not  standing  still,  and  during  the 
next  thirty  years  many  things  happened.  Vaihinger 
found  the  new  sect  of  Pragmatists  coming  into  fashion 
with  ideas  resembling  his  own,  though  in  a  cruder 
shape,  which  seemed  to  render  philosophy  the  “  mere- 
trix  theologorum.”  Many  distinguished  thinkers  were 
working  towards  an  attitude  more  or  less  like  his  own, 

1  I  have  based  this  sketch  on  an  attractive  and  illuminating  account 
of  his  own  development  written  by  Professor  Vaihinger  for  Dr.  Raymund 
Schmidt’s  highly  valuable  series,  Die  Deutsche  Philosophic  der  Gegcn- 
wart  in  Seibsldarsteliungcn  (1921),  vol.  li. 


94 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


especially  Nietzsche,  whom  (like  many  others  even 
to-day)  he  had  long  regarded  with  prejudice  and 
avoided,  but  now  discovered  to  be  “a  great  liberator” 
with  congenial  veins  of  thought.  Vaihinger  realised 
that  his  conception  was  being  independently  put  for¬ 
ward  from  various  sides,  often  in  forms  that  to  him 
seemed  imperfect  or  vicious.  It  was  no  longer  ad¬ 
visable  to  hold  back  his  book.  In  1911,  therefore, 
“Die  Philosophic  des  Als  Ob”  appeared. 

The  problem  which  Vaihinger  set  out  to  solve  was 
this:  How  comes  it  about  that  with  consciously  false 
ideas  we  yet  reach  conclusions  that  are  in  harmony 
with  Nature  and  appeal  to  us  as  Truth?  That  we  do 
so  is  obvious,  especially  in  the  “exact”  branches  of 
science.  In  mathematics  it  is  notorious  that  we  start 
from  absurdities  to  reach  a  realm  of  law,  and  our 
whole  conception  of  the  nature  of  the  world  is  based  on 
a  foundation  wThich  we  believe  to  have  no  existence. 
For  even  the  most  sober  scientific  investigator  in 
science,  the  most  thoroughgoing  Positivist,  cannot 
dispense  with  fiction;  he  must  at  least  make  use  of 
categories,  and  they  are  already  fictions,  analogical 
fictions,  or  labels,  which  give  us  the  same  pleasure  as 
children  receive  when  they  are  told  the  “name”  of  a 
thing.  Fiction  is,  indeed,  an  indispensable  supplement 
to  logic,  or  even  a  part  of  it ;  whether  we  are  working 
inductively  or  deductively,  both  ways  hang  closely 
together  with  fiction ;  and  axioms,  though  they  seek  to 
be  primary  verities,  are  more  akin  to  fiction.  If  we  had 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  95 

realised  the  nature  of  axioms,  the  doctrine  of  Einstein, 
which  sweeps  away  axioms  so  familiar  to  us  that  they 
seem  obvious  truths,  and  substitutes  others  which 
«$eem  absurd  because  they  are  unfamiliar,  might  not 
have  been  so  bewildering. 

Physics,  especially  mathematical  physics,  Vaihinger 
explains  in  detail,  has  been  based,  and  fruitfully  based, 
on  fictions.  The  infinite,  infinitely  little  or  infinitely 
great,  while  helpful  in  lightening  our  mental  opera¬ 
tions,  is  a  fiction.  The  Greeks  disliked  and  avoided  it, 
and  “the  gradual  formation  of  this  conception  is  one 
of  the  most  charming  and  instructive  themes  in  the 
history  of  science/’  indeed,  one  of  the  most  noteworthy 
spectacles  in  the  history  of  the  human  spirit;  we  see  the 
working  of  a  logical  impulse  first  feeling  in  the  dark, 
gradually  constructing  ideas  fitted  to  yield  precious 
service,  yet  full  of  hopeless  contradictions,  without 
any  relation  to  the  real  world.  That  absolute  space  is  a 
fiction,  Vaihinger  points  out,  is  no  new  idea.  Hobbes 
had  declared  it  was  only  a  phantasma;  Leibnitz,  who 
agreed,  added  that  it  was  merely  “  the  idolum  of  a  few 
modem  Englishmen,”  and  called  time,  extension,  and 
movement  “  choses  ideates .”  Berkeley,  in  attacking  the 
defective  conceptions  of  the  mathematicians,  failed  to 
see  that  it  was  by  means  of,  and  not  in  spite  of,  these 
logically  defective  conceptions  that  they  attained  logi¬ 
cally  valuable  results.  All  the  marks  of  fiction  were  set 
up  on  the  mathematician’s  pure  space;  it  was  impossi¬ 
ble  and  unthinkable;  yet  it  proved  useful  and  fruitful. 


96 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


The  tautological  fiction  of  “  Force  ”  —  an  empty 
reduplication  of  the  fact  of  a  succession  of  relation¬ 
ships  —  is  one  that  we  constantly  fall  back  on  with 
immense  satisfaction  and  with  the  feeling  of  having 
achieved  something;  it  has  been  a  highly  convenient 
fiction  which  has  aided  representation  and  experience. 
It  is  one  of  the  most  famous,  and  also,  it  must  be  added, 
one  of  the  most  fatal  of  fantasies.  For  when  we  talk 
of,  for  instance,  a  “life-force ”  and  its  elan ,  or  whatever 
other  dainty  term  we  like  to  apply  to  it,  we  are  not  only 
summarily  mingling  together  many  separate  phenom¬ 
ena,  but  we  are  running  the  risk  that  our  conception 
may  be  taken  for  something  that  really  exists.  There 
is  always  temptation,  when  two  processes  tend  to 
follow  each  other,  to  call  the  property  of  the  first  to  be 
followed  by  the  other  its  “force/'  and  to  measure  that 
force  by  the  magnitude  of  the  result.  In  reality  we 
only  have  succession  and  coexistence,  and  the  “  force  ” 
is  something  that  we  imagine. 

We  must  not,  therefore,  treat  our  imagination  with 
contempt  as  was  formerly  the  fashion,  but  rather  the 
reverse.  The  two  great  periods  of  English  Philosophy, 
Vaihinger  remarks,  ended  with  Ockham  and  with 
Hume,  who  each  took  up,  in  effect.,  the  fictional  point 
of  view,  but  both  too  much  on  the  merely  negative 
side,  without  realising  the  positive  and  constructive 
value  of  fictions.  English  law  has  above  all  realised  it, 
even,  he  adds,  to  the  point  of  absurdity.  Nothing  is  so 
precious  as  fiction,  provided  only  one  chooses  the  right 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  97 

fiction.  “Matter”  is  such  a  fiction.  There  are  still 
people  who  speak  with  lofty  contempt  of  “Material¬ 
ism”;  they  mean  well,  but  they  are  unhappy  in  their 
terms  of  abuse.  When  Berkeley  demonstrated  the 
impossibility  of  “matter,”  he  thought  he  could  afford 
to  throw  away  the  conception  as  useless.  He  was  quite 
wrong;  it  is  logically  contradictory  ideas  that  are  the 
most  valuable.  Matter  is  a  fiction,  just  as  the  funda¬ 
mental  ideas  with  which  the  sciences  generally  operate 
are  mostly  fictions,  and  the  scientific  materialisation 
of  the  world  has  proved  a  necessary  and  useful  fiction, 
only  harmful  when  we  regard  it  as  hypothesis  and 
therefore  possibly  true.  The  representative  world  is  a 
system  of  fictions.  It  is  a  symbol  by  the  help  of  which 
we  orient  ourselves.  The  business  of  science  is  to  make 
the  symbol  ever  more  adequate,  but  it  remains  a 
symbol,  a  means  of  action,  for  action  is  the  last  end  of 
thinking. 

The  “atom,”  to  which  matter  is  ultimately  reduced, 
is  regarded  by  Vaihinger  as  equally  a  fiction,  though  it 
was  at  first  viewed  as  an  hypothesis,  and  it  may  be 
added  that  since  he  wrote  it  seems  to  have  returned  to 
the  stage  of  hypothesis.1  But  when  with  Boscovich  the 
“atom”  was  regarded  as  simply  the  bearer  of  energy, 
it  became  “literally  a  hypostatised  nothing.”  We  have 

1  “Most  workers  on  the  problem  of  atomic  constitution/’  remarks 
Sir  Ernest  Rutherford  ( Nature ,  5th  August,  1922),  “take  as  a  working 
hypothesis  that  the  atoms  of  matter  are  purely  electrical  structures,  and 
that  ultimately  it  is  hoped  to  explain  all  the  properties  of  atoms  as  a 
result  of  certain  combinations  of  the  two  fundamental  units  of  positiv® 
and  negative  electricity,  the  proton  and  electron.” 


98  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

to  realise  at  the  same  time  that  every  “thing”  is  a 
“summatory  fiction,”  for  to  say,  as  is  often  said,  that 
a  “thing”  has  properties  and  yet  has  a  real  existence 
apart  from  its  properties  is  obviously  only  a  convenient 
manner  of  speech,  a  “verbal  fiction.”  The  “force  of 
attraction,”  as  Newton  himself  pointed  out,  belongs  to 
the  same  class  of  summatory  fictions. 

Vaihinger  is  throughout  careful  to  distinguish  fiction 
alike  from  hypothesis  and  dogma.  He  regards  the 
distinction  as,  methodologically,  highly  important, 
though  not  always  easy  to  make.  The  “dogma”  is  put 
forward  as  an  absolute  and  unquestionable  truth;  the 
“hypothesis”  is  a  possible  or  probable  truth,  such  as 
Darwin’s  doctrine  of  descent;  the  “fiction”  is  impos¬ 
sible,  but  it  enables  us  to  reach  what  for  us  is  relatively 
truth,  and,  above  all,  while  hypothesis  simply  con¬ 
tributes  to  knowledge,  fiction  thus  used  becomes  a 
guide  to  practical  action  and  indispensable  to  what  we 
feel  to  be  progress.  Thus  the  mighty  and  civilising 
structure  of  Roman  law  was  built  up  by  the  aid  of 
what  the  Romans  themselves  recognised  as  fictions, 
while  in  the  different  and  more  flexible  system  of  Eng¬ 
lish  laws  a  constant  inspiration  to  action  has  been 
furnished  by  the  supposed  privileges  gained  by  Magna 
Carta,  though  we  now  recognise  them  as  fictitious. 
Many  of  our  ideas  tend  to  go  through  the  three  stages 
of  Dogma,  Hypothesis,  and  Fiction,  sometimes  in  that 
order  and  sometimes  in  the  reverse  order.  Hypothesis 
especially  presents  a  state  of  labile  stability  which  is 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


99 

unpleasant  to  the  mind,  so  it  tends  to  become  either 
dogma  or  fiction.  The  ideas  of  Christianity,  beginning 
as  dogmas,  have  passed  through  all  three  stages  in  the 
minds  of  thinkers  during  recent  centuries:  the  myths  of 
Plato,  beginning  as  fiction,  not  only  passed  through  the 
three  stages,  but  then  passed  back  again,  being  now 
again  regarded  as  fiction.  The  scientifically  valuable 
fiction  is  a  child  of  modern  times,  but  we  have  already 
emerged  from  the  period  when  the  use  of  fiction  was 
confined  to  the  exact  sciences. 

Thus  we  find  fiction  fruitfully  flourishing  in  the 
biological  and  social  sciences  and  even  in  the  highest 
spheres  of  human  spiritual  activity.  The  Linnaean  and 
similar  classificatory  systems  are  fictions,  even  though 
put  forward  as  hypotheses,  having  their  value  simply 
as  pictures,  as  forms  of  representation,  but  leading 
to  contradictions  and  liable  to  be  replaced  by  other 
systems  which  present  more  helpful  pictures.  There 
are  still  people  who  disdain  Adam  Smith’s  “economic 
man,”  as  though  proceeding  from  a  purely  selfish  view 
of  life,  although  Buckle,  forestalling  Vaihinger,  long 
ago  explained  that  Smith  was  deliberately  making  use 
of  a  “valid  artifice,”  separating  facts  that  he  knew  to 
be  in  nature  inseparable  —  he  based  his  moral  theory 
on  a  totally  different  kind  of  man  —  because  so  he 
could  reach  results  approximately  true  to  the  observed 
phenomena.  Bentham  also  adopted  a  fiction  for  his 
own  system,  though  believing  it  to  be  an  hypothesis, 
and  Mill  criticised  it  as  being  “geometrical”;  the 


IOO 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


criticism  is  correct,  comments  Vaihinger,  but  the 
method  was  not  thereby  invalidated,  for  in  compli¬ 
cated  fields  no  other  method  can  be  fruitfully  used. 

The  same  law  holds  when  we  approach  our  highest 
and  most  sacred  conceptions.  It  was  recognised  by 
enlightened  philosophers  and  theologians  before  Vai¬ 
hinger  that  the  difference  between  body  and  soul  is  not 
different  from  that  between  matter  and  force,  —  a  pro¬ 
visional  and  useful  distinction,  —  that  light  and  dark¬ 
ness,  life  and  death,  are  abstractions,  necessary,  indeed, 
but  in  their  application  to  reality  always  to  be  used 
with  precaution.  On  the  threshold  of  the  moral  world 
we  meet  the  idea  of  Freedom,  “one  of  the  weightiest 
conceptions  man  has  ever  formed,”  once  a  dogma,  in 
course  of  time  an  hypothesis,  now  in  the  eyes  of  many 
a  fiction;  yet  we  cannot  do  without  it,  even  although 
we  may  be  firmly  convinced  that  our  acts  are  deter¬ 
mined  by  laws  that  cannot  be  broken.  Many  other 
great  conceptions  have  tended  to  follow  the  same 
course.  God,  the  Soul,  Immortality,  the  Moral  World- 
Order.  The  critical  hearers  understand  what  is  meant 
when  these  great  words  are  used,  and  if  the  uncritical 
misunderstand,  that,  adds  Vaihinger,  may  sometimes 
be  also  useful.  For  these  things  are  Ideals,  and  all 
Ideals  are,  logically  speaking,  fictions.  As  Science 
leads  to  the  Imaginary,  so  Life  leads  to  the  Impossible; 
without  them  we  cannot  reach  the  heights  we  are  born 
to  scale.  “Taken  literally,  however,  our  most  valuable 
conceptions  are  worthless/’ 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


ioi 


When  we  review  the  vast  field  which  Vaihinger  sum¬ 
marises,  we  find  that  thinking  and  existing  must  ever 
be  on  two  different  planes.  The  attempt  of  Hegel  and 
his  followers  to  transform  subjective  processes  into 
objective  world-processes,  Vaihinger  maintains,  will 
not  work  out.  The  Thing-in-Itself,  the  Absolute,  re¬ 
mains  a  fiction,  though  the  ultimate  and  most  neces¬ 
sary  fiction,  for  without  it  representation  would  be 
unintelligible.  We  can  only  regard  reality  as  a  Hera- 
clitean  flux  of  happening  —  though  Vaihinger  fails  to 
point  out  that  this  “ reality”  also  can  only  be  an 
image  or  symbol  —  and  our  thinking  would  itself  be 
fluid  if  it  were  not  that  by  fiction  we  obtain  imaginary 
standpoints  and  boundaries  by  which  to  gain  control 
of  the  flow  of  reality.  It  is  the  special  art  and  object  of 
thinking  to  attain  existence  by  quite  other  methods 
than  that  of  existence  itself.  But  the  wish  by  so  doing 
to  understand  the  world  is  both  unrealisable  and  fool¬ 
ish,  for  we  are  only  trying  to  comprehend  our  own 
fictions.  We  can  never  solve  the  so-called  world- 
riddle  because  what  seem  riddles  to  us  are  merely  the 
contradictions  we  have  ourselves  created.  Yet,  though 
the  way  of  thinking  cannot  be  the  way  of  being,  since 
they  stand  on  such  different  foundations,  thinking 
always  has  a  kind  of  parallelism  with  being,  and 
though  we  make  our  reckoning  with  a  reality  that  we 
falsify,  yet  the  practical  result  tends  to  come  out  right. 
Just  because  thinking  is  different  from  reality,  its 
forms  must  also  be  different  in  order  to  correspond 


102 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


with  reality.  Our  conceptions,  our  conventional  signs, 
have  a  furtive  function  to  perform;  thinking  in  its 
lower  grades  is  comparable  to  paper  money,  and  in  its 
higher  forms  it  is  a  kind  of  poetry. 

Imagination  is  thus  a  constitutive  part  of  all  think¬ 
ing.  We  may  make  distinctions  between  practical 
scientific  thinking  and  disinterested  aesthetic  thinking. 
Yet  all  thinking  is  finally  a  comparison.  Scientific 
fictions  are  parallel  with  aesthetic  fictions.  The  poet  is 
the  type  of  all  thinkers:  there  is  no  sharp  boundary 
between  the  region  of  poetry  and  the  region  of  science. 
Both  alike  are  not  ends  in  themselves,  but  means  to 
higher  ends. 

Vaihinger’s  doctrine  of  the  “as  if”  is  not  immune 
from  criticism  on  more  than  one  side,  and  it  is  fairly  ob¬ 
vious  that,  however  sound  the  general  principle,  par¬ 
ticular  “hctions”  may  alter  their  status,  and  have 
even  done  so  since  the  book  was  written.  Moreover,  the 
doctrine  is  not  always  quite  congruous  with  itself.  Nor 
can  it  be  said  that  Vaihinger  ever  really  answered  the 
question  with  which  he  set  out.  In  philosophy,  how¬ 
ever,  it  is  not  the  attainment  of  the  goal  that  matters, 
it  is  the  things  that  are  met  with  by  the  way.  And  Vai¬ 
hinger’s  philosophy  is  not  only  of  interest  because  it 
presents  so  clearly  and  vigorously  a  prevailing  tend¬ 
ency  in  modern  thought.  Rightly  understood,  it  sup¬ 
plies  a  fortifying  influence  to  those  who  may  have  seen 
their  cherished  spiritual  edifice,  whatever  it  may  be, 
fall  around  them  and  are  tempted  to  a  mood  of  disillu- 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  103 

sionment.  We  make  our  own  world;  when  we  have 
made  it  awry,  we  can  remake  it,  approximately  truer, 
though  it  cannot  be  absolutely  true,  to  the  facts.  It 
will  never  be  finally  made;  we  are  always  stretching 
forth  to  larger  and  better  fictions  which  answer  more 
truly  to  our  growing  knowledge  and  experience.  Even 
when  we  walk,  it  is  only  by  a  series  of  regulated  errors, 
Vaihinger  well  points  out,  a  perpetual  succession  of 
falls  to  one  side  and  the  other  side.  Our  whole  progress 
through  life  is  of  the  same  nature ;  all  thinking  is  a  regu¬ 
lated  error.  For  we  cannot,  as  Vaihinger  insists,  choose 
our  errors  at  random  or  in  accordance  with  what  hap¬ 
pens  to  please  us;  such  fictions  are  only  too  likely  to 
turn  into  deadening  dogmas:  the  old  vis  dormitiva  is  the 
type  of  them,  mere  husks  that  are  of  no  vital  use  and 
help  us  not  at  all.  There  are  good  fictions  and  bad  fic¬ 
tions  just  as  there  are  good  poets  and  bad  poets.  It  is  in 
the  choice  and  regulation  of  our  errors,  in  our  readiness 
to  accept  ever-closer  approximations  to  the  unattain¬ 
able  reality,  that  we  think  rightly  and  live  rightly.  We 
triumph  in  so  far  as  we  succeed  in  that  regulation.  11 A 
lost  battle,”  Foch,  quoting  De  Maistre,  lays  down  in 
his  “  Principes  de  Guerre,”  “is  a  battle  one  thinks  one 
has  lost  ” ;  the  battle  is  won  by  the  fiction  that  it  is  won. 
It  is  so  also  in  the  battle  of  life,  in  the  whole  art  of 
living.  Freud  regards  dreaming  as  fiction  that  helps  us 
to  sleep ;  thinking  we  may  regard  as  fiction  that  helps 
us  to  live.  Man  lives  by  imagination. 


104 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


in 

Yet  what  we  consider  our  highest  activities  arise  out 
of  what  we  are  accustomed  to  regard  as  the  lowest. 
That  is,  indeed,  merely  a  necessary  result  of  evolution; 
bipeds  like  ourselves  spring  out  of  many-limbed  crea¬ 
tures  whom  we  should  now  regard  as  little  better  than 
vermin,  and  the  adult  human  creature  whose  eyes,  as 
he  sometimes  imagines,  are  fixed  on  the  stars,  was  a 
few  years  earlier  merely  a  small  animal  crawling  on  all 
fours.  The  impulse  of  the  philosopher,  of  the  man  of 
science,  of  any  ordinary  person  who  sometimes  thinks 
about  seemingly  abstract  or  disinterested  questions  — * 
we  must  include  the  whole  range  of  the  play  of  thought 
in  response  to  the  stimulus  of  curiosity  —  may  seem  at 
the  first  glance  to  be  a  quite  secondary  and  remote  prod¬ 
uct  of  the  great  primary  instincts.  Yet  it  is  not  diffi¬ 
cult  to  bring  this  secondary  impulse  into  direct  relation 
with  the  fundamental  primary  instincts,  even,  and  per¬ 
haps  indeed  chiefly,  with  the  instinct  of  sex.  On  the 
mental  side  —  which  is  not,  of  course,  its  fundamental 
side  —  the  sexual  instinct  is  mainly,  perhaps  solely,  a 
reaction  to  the  stimulus  of  curiosity.  Beneath  that 
mental  surface  the  really  active  force  is  a  physiologi¬ 
cally  based  instinct  urgent  towards  action,  but  the  boy 
or  girl  who  first  becomes  conscious  of  the  mental  stim¬ 
ulus  is  unaware  of  the  instinct  it  springs  from,  and  may 
even  disregard  as  unimportant  its  specific  physiological 
manifestations.  The  child  is  only  conscious  of  new 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  105 

curiosities,  and  these  it  persistently  seeks  to  satisfy  at 
any  available  or  likely  source  of  information,  aided  by 
the  strenuous  efforts  of  its  own  restlessly  active  imagi¬ 
nation.  It  is  in  exactly  the  same  position  as  the  meta¬ 
physician,  or  the  biologist,  or  any  thinker  who  is  faced 
by  complex  and  yet  unsolved  problems.  And  the  child 
is  at  first  baffled  by  just  the  same  kind  of  obstacles, 
due,  not  like  those  of  the  thinker,  to  the  silence  of  re¬ 
calcitrant  Nature,  but  to  the  silence  of  parents  and 
teachers,  or  to  their  deliberate  efforts  to  lead  him 
astray. 

Where  do  babies  come  from?  That  is  perhaps  for 
many  children  the  earliest  scientific  problem  that  is  in 
this  way  rendered  so  difficult  of  solution.  No  satisfy- 

r 

ing  solution  comes  from  the  sources  of  information  to 
which  the  child  is  wont  to  appeal.  He  is  left  to  such 
slight  imperfect  observations  as  he  can  himself  make; 
on  such  clues  his  searching  intellect  works  and  with  the 
aid  of  imagination  weaves  a  theory,  more  or  less  remote 
from  the  truth,  which  may  possibly  explain  the  phe¬ 
nomena.  It  is  a  genuine  scientific  process  —  the  play  of 
intellect  and  imagination  around  a  few  fragments  of 
observed  fact  —  and  it  is  undoubtedly  a  valuable  dis¬ 
cipline  for  the  childish  mind,  though  if  it  is  too  pro¬ 
longed  it  may  impede  or  distort  natural  development, 
and  if  the  resulting  theory  is  radically  false  it  may  lead, 
as  the  theories  of  scientific  adults  sometimes  lead,  if 
not  speedily  corrected,  to  various  unfortunate  results. 

A  little  later,  when  he  has  ceased  to  be  a  child  and 


io6 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


puberty  is  approaching,  another  question  is  apt  to 
arise  in  the  boy’s  mind:  What  is  a  woman  like?  There 
is  also,  less  often  and  more  carefully  concealed,  the  cor¬ 
responding  curiosity  in  the  girl’s  mind.  Earlier  this 
question  had  seemed  of  no  interest;  it  had  never  even 
occurred  to  ask  it ;  there  was  little  realisation  —  some¬ 
times  none  at  all  —  of  any  sexual  difference.  Now  it 
sometimes  becomes  a  question  of  singular  urgency,  in 
the  solution  of  which  it  is  necessary  for  the  boy  to  con¬ 
centrate  all  the  scientific  apparatus  at  his  command. 
For  there  may  be  no  ways  of  solving  it  directly,  least  of 
all  for  a  well-behaved,  self-respecting  boy  or  a  shy, 
modest  girl.  The  youthful  intellect  is  thus  held  in  full 
tension,  and  its  developing  energy  directed  into  all 
sorts  of  new  channels  in  order  to  form  an  imaginative 
picture  of  the  unknown  reality,  fascinating  because  in¬ 
completely  known.  All  the  chief  recognised  mental 
processes  of  dogma,  hypothesis,  and  fiction,  developed 
in  the  history  of  the  race,  are  to  this  end  instinctively 
created  afresh  in  the  youthful  individual  mind,  end¬ 
lessly  formed  and  re-formed  and  tested  in  order  to  fill 
in  the  picture.  The  young  investigator  becomes  a  dili¬ 
gent  student  of  literature  and  laboriously  examines  the 
relevant  passages  he  finds  in  the  Bible  or  other  ancient 
primitive  naked  books.  He  examines  statues  and  pic¬ 
tures.  Perhaps  he  finds  some  old  elementary  manual 
of  anatomy,  but  here  the  long  list  of  structures  with 
Latin  names  proves  far  more  baffling  than  helpful  to 
the  youthful  investigator  who  can  in  no  possible  way 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  107 

fit  them  all  into  the  smooth  surface  shown  by  the  stat¬ 
ues.  Yet  the  creative  and  critical  habit  of  thought,  the 
scientific  mind  generated  by  this  search,  is  destined  to 
be  of  immense  value,  and  long  outlives  the  time  when 
the  eagerly  sought  triangular  spot,  having  fulfilled  its 
intellectual  function,  has  become  a  familiar  region, 
viewed  with  indifference,  or  at  most  a  homely  tender¬ 
ness. 

That  was  but  a  brief  and  passing  episode,  however 
permanently  beneficial  its  results  might  prove.  With 
the  achievement  of  puberty,  with  the  coming  of  adoles¬ 
cence,  a  larger  and  higher  passion  fills  the  youth’s  soul. 
He  forgets  the  woman’s  body,  his  idealism  seems  to 
raise  him  above  the  physical:  it  is  the  woman’s  person¬ 
ality  —  most  likely  some  particular  woman’s  personal¬ 
ity  —  that  he  desires  to  know  and  to  grasp. 

A  twofold  development  tends  to  take  place  at  this 
age  —  in  those  youths,  that  is  to  say,  who  possess  the 
latent  attitude  for  psychic  development  —  and  that  in 
two  diverse  directions,  both  equally  away  from  definite 
physical  desire,  which  at  this  age  is  sometimes,  though 
not  always,  at  its  least  prominent  place  in  conscious¬ 
ness.  On  the  one  hand  there  is  an  attraction  for  an 
idealised  person  —  perhaps  a  rather  remote  person,  for 
such  most  easily  lend  themselves  to  idealisation  —  of 
the  opposite  (or  occasionally  the  same)  sex,  it  may 
sometimes  for  a  time  even  be  the  heroine  of  a  novel. 
Such  an  ideal  attraction  acts  as  an  imaginative  and 
emotional  ferment.  The  imagination  is  stimulated  to 


io8 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


construct  for  the  first  time,  from  such  material  as  it 
has  come  across,  or  can  derive  from  within,  the  coherent 
picture  of  a  desirable  person.  The  emotions  are  trained 
and  disciplined  to  play  around  the  figure  thus  con¬ 
structed  with  a  new  impersonal  and  unselfish,  even  self- 
sacrificing,  devotion.  But  this  process  is  not  enough  to 
use  up  all  the  energies  of  the  developing  mind,  and  the 
less  so  as  such  impulses  are  unlikely  by  their  very  na¬ 
ture  to  receive  any  considerable  degree  of  gratification, 
for  they  are  of  a  nature  to  which  no  adequate  response 
is  possible. 

Thus  it  happens  in  adolescence  that  this  new  stream 
of  psychic  energy,  emotional  and  intellectual,  generated 
from  within,  concurrently  with  its  primary  personal 
function  of  moulding  the  object  of  love,  streams  over 
into  another  larger  and  more  impersonal  channel.  It  is, 
indeed,  lifted  on  to  a  higher  plane  and  transformed,  to 
exercise  a  fresh  function  by  initiating  new  objects  of 
ideal  desire.  The  radiant  images  of  religion  and  of  art 
as  well  as  of  science  —  however  true  it  may  be  that 
they  have  also  other  adjuvant  sources  —  thus  begin  to 
emerge  from  the  depths  beneath  consciousness.  They 
tend  to  absorb  and  to  embody  the  new  energy,  while  its 
primary  personal  object  may  sink  into  the  background, 
or  at  this  age  even  fail  to  be  conscious  at  all. 

This  process  —  the  process  in  which  all  abstract 
thinking  is  born  as  well  as  all  artistic  creation  —  must 
to  some  slight  extent  take  place  in  every  person  whose 
mental  activity  is  not  entirely  confined  to  the  immedi- 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  109 

ate  objects  of  sense.  But  in  persons  of  more  complex 
psychic  organisation  it  is  a  process  of  fundamental  im¬ 
portance.  In  those  of  the  highest  complex  organisation, 
indeed,  it  becomes  what  we  term  genius.  In  the  most 
magnificent  achievements  of  poetry  and  philosophy,  of 
art  and  of  science,  it  is  no  longer  forbidden  to  see  the 
ultimate  root  in  this  adolescent  development. 

To  some  a  glimpse  of  this  great  truth  has  from  time 
to  time  appeared.  Ferrero,  who  occupied  himself  with 
psychology  before  attaining  eminence  as  a  brilliant 
historian,  suggested  thirty  years  ago  that  the  art  im¬ 
pulse  and  its  allied  manifestations  are  transformed  sex¬ 
ual  instinct;  the  sexual  impulse  is  “the  raw  material,  so 
to  speak,  from  which  art  springs”;  he  connected  that 
transformation  with  a  less  development  of  the  sexual 
emotions  in  women ;  but  that  was  much  too  hasty  an  as¬ 
sumption,  for  apart  from  the  fact  that  such  transforma¬ 
tion  could  never  be  complete,  and  probably  less  so  in 
women  than  in  men,  we  have  also  to  consider  the  nature 
of  the  two  organisms  through  which  the  transformed 
emotions  would  operate,  probably  unlike  in  the  sexes, 
for  the  work  done  by  two  machines  obviously  does 
not  depend  entirely  upon  feeding  them  with  the  same 
amount  of  fuel,  but  also  on  the  construction  of  the  two 
engines.  Mobius,  a  brilliant  and  original,  if  not  erratic, 
German  psychologist,  who  was  also  concerned  with  the 
question  of  difference  in  the  amount  of  sexual  energy, 
regarded  the  art  impulse  as  a  kind  of  sexual  secondary 
character.  That  is  to  say,  no  doubt,  —  if  we  develop 


no 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


the  suggestion,  —  that  just  as  the  external  features  oJ 
the  male  and  his  external  activities,  in  the  ascending 
zoological  series,  have  been  developed  out  of  the  im¬ 
pulse  of  repressed  organic  sexual  desire  striving  to  man¬ 
ifest  itself  ever  more  urgently  in  the  struggle  to  over¬ 
come  the  coyness  of  the  female,  so  on  the  psychic  side 
there  has  been  a  parallel  impulse,  if  of  later  develop¬ 
ment,  to  carry  on  the  same  task  in  forms  of  art  which 
have  afterwards  acquired  an  independent  activity  and 
a  yet  further  growth  dissociated  from  this  primary  bio¬ 
logical  function.  We  think  of  the  natural  ornaments 
which  adorn  male  animals  from  far  down  in  the  scale 
even  up  to  man,  of  the  additions  made  thereto  by  tat¬ 
tooing  and  decoration  and  garments  and  jewels,  of  the 
parades  and  dances  and  songs  and  musical  serenades 
found  among  lower  animals  as  well  as  Man,  together 
with  the  love-lyrics  of  savages,  furnishing  the  begin¬ 
nings  of  the  most  exquisite  arts  of  civilisation. 

It  is  to  be  noted,  however,  that  these  suggestions  in¬ 
troduce  an  assumption  of  male  superiority,  or  male  in¬ 
feriority  —  according  to  our  scheme  of  values  —  which 
unnecessarily  prejudices  and  confuses  the  issue.  W7e 
have  to  consider  the  question  of  the  origin  of  art  apart 
from  any  supposed  predominance  of  its  manifestations 
in  one  sex  or  the  other.  In  my  own  conception  —  put 
forward  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago  —  of  what  I  called 
auto-erotic  activities,  it  was  on  such  a  basis  that  I 
sought  to  place  it,  since  I  regarded  those  auto-erotic 
phenomena  as  arising  from  the  impeded  spontaneous 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


in 


sexual  energy  of  the  organism  and  extending  from  sim¬ 
ple  physical  processes  to  the  highest  psychic  manifesta¬ 
tions;  “it  is  impossible  to  say  what  finest  elements  in 
art,  in  morals,  in  civilisation  generally,  may  not  really 
be  rooted  in  an  auto-erotic  impulse,”  though  I  was  care¬ 
ful  to  add  that  the  transmutation  of  sexual  energy  into 
other  forms  of  force  must  not  be  regarded  as  itself  com¬ 
pletely  accounting  for  all  the  finest  human  aptitudes  of 
sympathy  and  art  and  religion.1 

It  is  along  this  path,  it  may  perhaps  be  claimed,  — 
as  dimly  glimpsed  by  Nietzsche,  Hinton,  and  other 
earlier  thinkers,  —  that  the  main  explanation  of  the 
dynamic  process  by  which  the  arts,  in  the  widest  sense, 
have  come  into  being,  is  now  chiefly  being  explored. 
One  thinks  of  Freud  and  especially  of  Dr.  Otto  Rank, 
perhaps  the  most  brilliant  and  clairvoyant  of  the 
younger  investigators  who  still  stand  by  the  master’s 
side.  In  1905  Rank  wrote  a  little  essay  on  the  artist3 
in  which  this  mechanism  is  set  forth  and  the  artist 
placed,  in  what  the  psycho-analytic  author  considers 
his  due  place,  between  the  ordinary  dreamer  at  one  end 
and  the  neurotic  subject  at  the  other,  the  lower  forms 
of  art,  such  as  myth-making,  standing  near  to  dreams, 
and  the  higher  forms,  such  as  the  drama,  philosophy, 
and  the  founding  of  religions,  near  to  psycho-neurosis, 
but  all  possessing  a  sublimated  life-force  which  has  its 
root  in  some  modification  of  sexual  energy. 

1  Havelock  Ellis,  Studies  in  the  Psychology  of  Sex,  vol.  1. 

*  Otto  Rank,  Der  Kiinstler :  Ansdtze  zu  einer  Sexual  Psychologic. 


112 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


It  may  often  seem  that,  in  these  attempts  to  explain 
the  artist,  the  man  of  science  is  passed  over  or  left  in 
the  background,  and  that  is  true.  But  art  and  science, 
as  we  now  know,  have  the  same  roots.  The  supreme 
men  of  science  are  recognisably  artists,  and  the  earliest 
forms  of  art,  which  are  very  early  indeed,  —  Sir  Ar¬ 
thur  Evans  has  suggested  that  men  may  have  drawn 
before  they  talked,  —  were  doubtless  associated  with 
magic,  which  was  primitive  man’s  science,  or,  at  all 
events,  his  nearest  approximation  to  science.  The 
connection  of  the  scientific  instinct  with  the  sexual 
instinct  is  not,  indeed,  a  merely  recent  insight.  Many 
years  ago  it  was  clearly  stated  by  a  famous  Dutch 
author.  “Nature,  who  must  act  wisely  at  the  risk  of 
annihilation,’’  wrote  Multatuli  at  the  conclusion  of  his 
short  story,  “The  Adventures  of  Little  Walter,”  “has 
herein  acted  wisely  by  turning  all  her  powers  in  one 
direction.  Moralists  and  psychologists  have  long  since 
recognised,  without  inquiring  into  the  causes,  that 
curiosity  is  one  of  the  main  elements  of  love.  Yet  they 
were  only  thinking  of  sexual  love,  and  by  raising  the 
two  related  termini  in  corresponding  wise  on  to  a 
higher  plane  I  believe  that  the  noble  thirst  for  knowl¬ 
edge  springs  from  the  same  soil  in  which  noble  love 
grows.  To  press  through,  to  reveal,  to  possess,  to  di¬ 
rect,  and  to  ennoble,  that  is  the  task  and  the  longing, 
alike  of  the  lover  and  the  natural  discoverer.  So  that 
every  Ross  or  Franklin  is  a  Werther  of  the  Pole,  and 
whoever  is  in  love  is  a  Mungo  Park  of  the  spirit.” 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


113 


IV 

As  soon  as  we  begin  to  think  about  the  world  around  us 
in  what  we  vainly  call  a  disinterested  way  —  for  disin¬ 
terest  is,  as  Leibnitz  said,  a  chimera,  and  there  remains 
a  superior  interest  —  we  become  youths  and  lovers  and 
artists,  and  there  is  at  the  same  time  a  significant 
strain  of  sexual  imagery  in  our  thought.1  Among  our¬ 
selves  this  is  not  always  clear;  we  have  been  dulled  by 
the  routine  of  civilisation  and  the  artificial  formalities 
of  what  is  called  education.  It  is  clear  in  the  mytho- 
poeic  creation  of  comparative  primitive  thought,  but  in 
civilisation  it  is  in  the  work  of  men  of  genius  —  poets, 
philosophers,  painters,  and,  as  we  have  to  recognise, 
men  of  science  —  that  this  trait  is  most  conspicuously 
manifested.  To  realise  this  it  is  sufficient  to  contem¬ 
plate  the  personality  and  activity  of  one  of  the  earliest 
great  modern  men  of  science,  of  Leonardo  da  Vinci. 
Until  recent  times  it  would  have  seemed  rather  strange 
so  to  describe  Leonardo  da  Vinci.  He  still  seemed,  as  he 
was  in  his  own  time,  primarily  a  painter,  an  artist  in 
the  conventionally  narrow  sense,  and  as  such  one  of  the 
greatest,  fit  to  paint,  as  Browning  put  it,  one  of  the 
four  walls  of  the  New  Jerusalem.  Yet  even  his  contem¬ 
poraries  who  so  acclaimed  him  were  a  little  worried 
about  Leonardo  in  this  capacity.  He  accomplished  so 

1  The  sexual  strain  in  the  symbolism  of  language  is  touched  on  in  my 
Studies  in  the  Psychology  of  Sex,  vol.  v,  and  similar  traits  in  primitive 
legends  have  been  emphasised  —  many  would  say  over-emphasised  — - 
by  Freud  and  Jung. 


ii4  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

little,  he  worked  so  slowly,  he  left  so  much  unfinished, 
he  seemed  to  them  so  volatile  and  unstable.  He  was  an 
enigma  to  which  they  never  secured  the  key.  They 
failed  to  see,  though  it  is  clearly  to  be  read  even  in  his 
face,  that  no  man  ever  possessed  a  more  piercing  con¬ 
centration  of  vision,  a  more  fixed  power  of  attention, 
a  more  unshakable  force  of  will.  All  that  Leonardo 
achieved  in  painting  and  in  sculpture  and  in  architec¬ 
ture,  however  novel  or  grandiose,  was,  as  Solmi,  the 
highly  competent  Vincian  scholar  has  remarked,  merely 
a  concession  to  his  age,  in  reality  a  violence  done  to  his 
own  nature,  and  from  youth  to  old  age  he  had  directed 
his  whole  strength  to  one  end :  the  knowledge  and  the 
mastery  of  Nature.  In  our  own  time,  a  sensitive,  alert, 
widely  informed  critic  of  art,  Bernhard  Berenson,  set¬ 
ting  out  with  the  conventional  veneration  for  Leonardo 
as  a  painter,  slowly,  as  the  years  went  by  and  his  judg¬ 
ment  grew  more  mature,  adopted  a  more  critical  at¬ 
titude,  bringing  down  his  achievements  in  art  to 
moderate  dimensions,  yet  without  taking  any  interest 
in  Leonardo  as  a  stupendous  artist  in  science.  We  may 
well  understand  that  vein  of  contempt  for  the  crowd, 
even  as  it  almost  seems  the  hatred  for  human  society, 
the  spirit  of  Timon,  which  runs  across  Leonardo’s 
writings,  blended,  no  doubt  inevitably  blended,  with 
his  vein  of  human  sweetness.  This  stem  devotee  of 
knowledge  declared,  like  the  author  of  “The  Imitation 
of  Christ,”  that  “Love  conquers  all  things.”  There  is 
here  no  discrepancy.  The  man  who  poured  a  contemp- 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  115 

tuous  flood  of  irony  and  denunciation  over  the  most 
sacred  social  institutions  and  their  most  respectable 
representatives  was  the  same  man  —  the  Gospels  tell 
us  —  who  brooded  with  the  wings  of  a  maternal  tender¬ 
ness  over  the  pathos  of  human  things. 

When,  indeed,  our  imagination  plays  with  the  idea 
of  a  future  Overman,  it  is  Leonardo  who  comes  be¬ 
fore  us  as  his  forerunner.  Vasari,  who  had  never  seen 
Leonardo,  but  has  written  so  admirable  an  account  of 
him,  can  only  describe  him  as  “supernatural”  and 
“divine.”  In  more  recent  times  Nietzsche  remarked 
of  Leonardo  that  “there  is  something  super- European 
and  silent  in  him,  the  characteristic  of  one  who  has 
seen  too  wide  a  circle  of  things  good  and  evil.”  There 
Nietzsche  touches,  even  though  vaguely,  more  nearly 
than  Vasari  could,  the  distinguishing  mark  of  this  end¬ 
lessly  baffling  and  enchanting  figure.  Every  man  of 
genius  sees  the  world  at  a  different  angle  from  his  fel¬ 
lows,  and  there  is  his  tragedy.  But  it  is  usually  a  meas¬ 
urable  angle.  We  cannot  measure  the  angle  at  which 
Leonardo  stands;  he  strikes  athwart  the  line  of  our 
conventional  human  thought  in  ways  that  are  some¬ 
times  a  revelation  and  sometimes  an  impenetrable 
mystery.  We  are  reminded  of  the  saying  of  Heraclitus: 
“Men  hold  some  things  wrong  and  some  right;  God 
holds  all  things  fair.”  The  dispute  as  to  whether  he  was 
above  all  an  artist  or  a  man  of  science  is  a  foolish  and 
even  unmeaning  dispute.  In  the  vast  orbit  in  which 
Leonardo  moved  the  distinction  had  little  or  no  ex- 


n6 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


istence.  That  was  inexplicable  to  his  contemporaries 
whose  opinions  Vasari  echoes.  They  could  not  under¬ 
stand  that  he  was  not  of  the  crowd  of  makers  of  pretty 
things  who  filled  the  workshops  of  Florence.  They  saw 
a  man  of  beautiful  aspect  and  fine  proportions,  with  a 
long  curled  beard  and  wearing  a  rose-coloured  tunic, 
and  they  called  him  a  craftsman,  an  artist,  and  thought 
him  rather  fantastic.  But  the  medium  in  which  this 
artist  worked  was  Nature,  the  medium  in  which  the 
scientist  works;  every  problem  in  painting  was  to 
Leonardo  a  problem  in  science,  every  problem  in 
physics  he  approached  in  the  spirit  of  the  artist. 
"Human  ingenuity,”  he  said,  “can  never  devise  any¬ 
thing  more  simple  and  more  beautiful,  or  more  to  the 
purpose,  than  Nature  does.”  For  him,  as  later  for 
Spinoza,  reality  and  perfection  were  the  same  thing. 
Both  aspects  of  life  he  treats  as  part  of  his  task  —  the 
extension  of  the  field  of  human  knowledge,  the  inten¬ 
sion  of  the  power  of  human  skill ;  for  art,  or,  as  he  called 
it,  practice,  without  science,  he  said,  is  a  boat  without 
a  rudder.  Certainly  he  occupied  himself  much  with 
painting,  the  common  medium  of  self-expression  in  his 
day,  though  he  produced  so  few  pictures;  he  even 
wrote  a  treatise  on  painting;  he  possessed,  indeed,  a 
wider  perception  of  its  possibilities  than  any  artist  who 
ever  lived.  “Here  is  the  creator  of  modern  landscape ! ” 
exclaimed  Corot  before  Leonardo’s  pictures,  and  a  re¬ 
markable  description  he  has  left  of  the  precise  effects 
of  colour  and  light  produced  when  a  woman  in  white 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


117 

stands  on  green  grass  in  bright  sunshine  shows  that 
Leonardo  clearly  apprehended  the  plein-airiste' s  prob¬ 
lem.  Doubtless  it  will  prove  possible  to  show  that  he 
foresaw  still  later  methods.  He  rejected  these  methods 
because  it  seemed  to  him  that  the  artist  could  work- 
most  freely  by  moving  midway  between  light  and 
darkness,  and,  indeed,  he,  first  of  painters,  succeeded 
in  combining  them  —  just  as  he  said  also  that  Pleasure 
and  Pain  should  be  imaged  as  twins  since  they  are 
ever  together,  yet  back  to  back  because  ever  contrary 

—  and  devised  the  method  of  chiaroscuro ,  by  which 
light  reveals  the  richness  of  shade  and  shade  heightens 
the  brightness  of  light.  No  invention  could  be  more 
characteristic  of  this  man  whose  grasp  of  the  world 
ever  involved  the  union  of  opposites,  and  the  opposites 
both  apprehended  more  intensely  than  falls  to  the  lot 
of  other  men. 

Yet  it  is  noteworthy  that  Leonardo  constantly 
speaks  of  the  artist’s  function  as  searching  into  and  imi¬ 
tating  Nature,  a  view  which  the  orthodox  artist  an¬ 
athematises.  But  Leonardo  was  not  the  orthodox  art¬ 
ist,  not  even,  perhaps,  as  he  is  traditionally  regarded, 
one  of  the  world’s  supreme  painters.  For  one  may 
sympathise  with  Mr.  Berenson’s  engaging  attempt 

—  unconvincing  as  it  has  seemed  —  to  4 ‘expose”  Leo¬ 
nardo.  The  drawings  Mr.  Berenson,  like  every  one  else, 
admires  whole-heartedly,  but,  save  for  the  unfinished 
“Adoration,”  which  he  regards  as  a  summit  of  art,  he 
finds  the  paintings  mostly  meaningless  and  repellent. 


Ii8 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


He  cannot  rank  Leonardo  as  an  artist  higher  than 
Botticelli,  and  concludes  that  he  was  not  so  much  a 
great  painter  as  a  great  inventor  in  painting.  With 
that  conclusion  it  is  possible  that  Leonardo  himself 
would  have  agreed.  Painting  was  to  him,  he  said,  a 
subtle  invention  whereby  philosophical  speculation  can 
be  applied  to  all  the  qualities  of  forms.  He  seemed  to 
himself  to  be,  here  and  always,  a  man  standing  at  the 
mouth  of  the  gloomy  cavern  of  Nature  with  arched 
back,  one  hand  resting  on  his  knee  and  the  other  shad¬ 
ing  his  eyes,  as  he  peers  intently  into  the  darkness, 
possessed  by  fear  and  desire,  fear  of  the  threatening 
gloom  of  that  cavern,  desire  to  discover  what  miracle 
it  might  hold.  We  are  far  here  from  the  traditional 
attitude  of  the  painter;  we  are  nearer  to  the  attitude  of 
that  great  seeker  into  the  mysteries  of  Nature,  one  of 
the  very  few  born  of  women  to  whom  we  can  ever  even 
passingly  compare  Leonardo,  who  felt  in  old  age  that 
he  had  only  been  a  child  gathering  shells  and  pebbles 
on  the  shore  of  the  great  ocean  of  truth. 

It  is  almost  as  plausible  to  regard  Leonardo  as  pri¬ 
marily  an  engineer  as  primarily  a  painter.  He  offered 
his  services  as  a  military  engineer  and  architect  to  the 
Duke  of  Milan  and  set  forth  at  length  his  manifold 
claims  which  include,  one  may  note,  the  ability  to 
construct  what  we  should  now,  without  hesitation, 
describe  as  “tanks/’  At  a  later  period  he  actually  was 
appointed  architect  and  engineer-general  to  Caesar 
Borgia,  and  in  this  capacity  was  engaged  on  a  variety 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  1x9 

of  works.  He  has,  indeed,  been  described  as  the 
founder  of  professional  engineering.  He  was  the  seer 
of  coming  steam  engines  and  of  steam  navigation  and 
transportation.  He  was,  again,  the  inventor  of  innu¬ 
merable  varieties  of  ballistic  machines  and  ordnance, 
of  steam  guns  and  breech-loading  arms  with  screw 
breech-lock.  His  science  always  tended  to  become  ap¬ 
plied  science.  Experience  shows  the  road  to  practice, 
he  said,  science  is  the  guide  to  art.  Thus  he  saw  every 
problem  in  the  world  as  in  the  wide  sense  a  problem 
in  engineering.  All  nature  was  a  dynamic  process  of 
forces  beautifully  effecting  work,  and  it  is  this  as  it 
were  distinctive  vision  of  the  world  as  a  whole  which 
seems  to  give  Leonardo  that  marvellous  flair  for  de¬ 
tecting  vital  mechanism  in  every  field.  It  is  impossible 
even  to  indicate  summarily  the  vast  extent  of  the  re¬ 
gion  in  which  he  was  creating  a  new  world,  from  the 
statement,  which  he  set  down  in  large  letters,  “The 
sun  does  not  move,”  the  earth  being,  he  said,  a  star, 
“much  like  the  moon,”  down  to  such  ingenious  original 
devices  as  the  construction  of  a  diving-bell,  a  swim¬ 
ming-belt,  and  a  parachute  of  adequate  dimensions, 
while,  as  is  now  well  known,  Leonardo  not  only  medi¬ 
tated  with  concentrated  attention  on  the  problem  of 
flight,  but  realised  scientifically  the  difficulties  to  be 
encountered,  and  made  ingenious  attempts  to  over¬ 
come  them  in  the  designing  of  flying-machines.  It  is 
enough  —  following  expert  scientific  guidance  —  to 
enumerate  a  few  points :  he  studied  botany  in  the  bio- 


120 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


logical  spirit;  he  was  a  founder  of  geology,  discovering 
the  significance  of  fossils  and  realising  the  importance 
of  river  erosion;  by  his  studies  in  the  theories  of 
mechanics  and  their  utilization  in  peace  and  war  he 
made  himself  the  prototype  of  the  modern  man  of 
science.  He  was  in  turn  biologist  in  every  field  of  vital 
mechanism,  and  the  inaugurator  before  Vesalius 
(who,  however,  knew  nothing  of  his  predecessor’s 
work)  of  the  minute  study  of  anatomy  by  direct  in¬ 
vestigation  (after  he  had  found  that  Galen  could  not 
be  relied  on)  and  post-mortem  dissections;  he  nearly 
anticipated  Harvey’s  conception  of  the  circulation  of 
the  blood  by  studying  the  nature  of  the  heart  as  a 
pump.  He  was  hydraulician,  hydrographer,  geome¬ 
trician,  algebraist,  mechanician,  optician.1  These  are 
but  a  few  of  the  fields  in  which  Leonardo’s  marvellous 
insight  into  the  nature  of  the  forces  that  make  the 
world  and  his  divining  art  of  the  methods  of  employ¬ 
ing  them  to  human  use  have  of  late  years  been  re¬ 
vealed.  For  centuries  they  were  concealed  in  note¬ 
books  scattered  through  Europe  and  with  difficulty 
decipherable.  Yet  they  are  not  embodied  in  vague 
utterances  or  casual  intuitions,  but  display  a  laborious 
concentration  on  the  precise  details  of  the  difficulties 
to  be  overcome;  nor  was  patient  industry  in  him,  as 
often  happens,  the  substitute  for  natural  facility,  for 

1  Einstein,  in  conversation  with  Moszkowski,  expressed  doubt  as  to 
the  reality  of  Leonardo’s  previsions  of  modern  science.  But  it  scarcely 
appeared  that  he  had  investigated  the  matter,  while  the  definite  testi¬ 
mony  of  the  experts  in  many  fields  who  have  done  so  cannot  be  put  aside. 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


121 


he  was  a  person  of  marvellous  natural  facility,  and, 
like  such  persons,  most  eloquent  and  persuasive  in 
speech.  At  the  same  time  his  more  general  and  reflec¬ 
tive  conclusions  are  expressed  in  a  style  combining 
the  maximum  of  clarity  with  the  maximum  of  con¬ 
cision,  —  far,  indeed,  removed  from  the  characteristic 
florid  redundancy  of  Italian  prose,  —  which  makes 
Leonardo,  in  addition  to  all  else,  a  supreme  master  of 
language.1 

Yet  the  man  to  whom  we  must  credit  these  vast 
intellectual  achievements  was  no  abstracted  philoso¬ 
pher  shut  up  in  a  laboratory.  He  was,  even  to  look 
upon,  one  of  the  most  attractive  and  vivid  figures  that 
ever  walked  the  earth.  As  has  sometimes  happened 
with  divine  and  mysterious  persons,  he  was  the  natural 
child  of  his  mother,  Caterina,  of  whom  we  are  only  told 
that  she  was  “of  good  blood,”  belonging  to  Vinci  like 
Ser  Piero  the  father,  and  that  a  few  years  after  Leo¬ 
nardo’s  birth  she  became  the  reputable  wife  of  a  citi¬ 
zen  of  his  native  town.  Ser  Piero  da  Vinci  was  a  notary, 
of  a  race  of  notaries,  but  the  busiest  notary  in  Florence 
and  evidently  a  man  of  robust  vigour;  he  married  four 
times  and  his  youngest  child  was  fifty  years  the  junior 
of  Leonardo.  We  hear  of  the  extraordinary  physical 

1  For  the  Italian  reader  of  Leonardo  the  fat  little  volume  of  Frammenti , 
edited  by  Dr.  Solmi  and  published  by  Barbera,  is  a  precious  and  inex¬ 
haustible  pocket  companion.  For  the  English  reader  Mr.  MacCurdy's 
larger  but  much  less  extensive  volume  of  extracts  from  the  Note-Books , 
©r  the  still  further  abridged  Thoughts ,  must  suffice.  Herbert  Horne's 
annotated  version  of  Vasari’s  Life  is  excellent  for  Leonardo’s  personality 
and  career. 


I2Z  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

strength  of  Leonardo  himself,  of  his  grace  and  charm, 
of  his  accomplishments  in  youth,  especially  in  singing 
and  playing  on  the  flute,  though  he  had  but  an  ele¬ 
mentary  school  education.  Except  for  what  he  learnt 
in  the  workshop  of  the  many-sided  but  then  still 
youthful  Verrocchio,  he  was  his  own  schoolmaster,  and 
was  thus  enabled  to  attain  that  absolute  emancipa¬ 
tion  from  authority  and  tradition  which  made  him 
indifferent  even  to  the  Greeks,  to  whom  he  was  most 
akin.  He  was  left-handed ;  his  peculiar  method  of  writ¬ 
ing  long  raised  the  suspicion  that  it  was  deliberately 
adopted  for  concealment,  but  it  is  to-day  recognised 
as  simply  the  ordinary  mirror-writing  of  a  left-handed 
child  without  training.  This  was  not  the  only  anomaly 
in  Leonardo’s  strange  nature.  We  now  know  that  he 
was  repeatedly  charged  as  a  youth  on  suspicion  of 
homosexual  offences;  the  result  remains  obscure,  but 
there  is  some  reason  to  think  he  knew  the  inside  of  a 
prison.  Throughout  life  he  loved  to  surround  himself 
with  beautiful  youths,  though  no  tradition  of  license 
or  vice  clings  to  his  name.  The  precise  nature  of  his 
sexual  temperament  remains  obscure.  It  mocks  us, 
but  haunts  us  from  out  of  his  most  famous  pictures. 
There  is,  for  instance,  the  “John  the  Baptist”  of  the 
Louvre,  which  we  may  dismiss  with  the  distinguished 
art  critic  of  to-day  as  an  impudent  blasphemy  or  brood 
over  long,  without  being  clearly  able  to  determine 
into  what  obscure  region  of  the  Freudian  Unconscious 
Leonardo  had  here  adventured.  Freud  himself  hits 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


123 


devoted  one  of  his  most  fascinating  essays  to  a  psycho¬ 
analytic  interpretation  of  Leonardo’s  enigmatic  per¬ 
sonality.  He  admits  it  is  a  speculation;  we  may  take 
it  or  leave  it.  But  Freud  has  rightly  apprehended  that 
in  Leonardo  sexual  passion  was  largely  sublimated 
into  intellectual  passion,  in  accordance  with  his  own 
saying,  “  Nothing  can  be  loved  or  hated  unless  first 
we  have  knowledge  of  it,”  or,  as  he  elsewhere  said, 
“True  and  great  love  springs  out  of  great  knowledge, 
and  where  you  know  little  you  can  love  but  little  or 
not  at  all.”  So  it  was  that  Leonardo  became  a  master 
of  life.  Vasari  could  report  of  him  —  almost  in  the 
words  it  was  reported  of  another  supreme  but  widely 
different  figure,  the  Jesuit  saint,  Francis  Xavier  — 
that  “with  the  splendour  of  his  most  beautiful  coun¬ 
tenance  he  made  serene  every  broken  spirit.”  To 
possess  by  self-mastery  the  sources  of  love  and  hate  is 
to  transcend  good  and  evil  and  so  to  possess  the  Over¬ 
man’s  power  of  binding  up  the  hearts  that  are  broken 
by  good  and  evil. 

Every  person  of  genius  is  in  some  degree  at  once 
man,  woman,  and  child.  Leonardo  was  all  three  in  the 
extreme  degree  and  yet  without  any  apparent  con¬ 
flict.  The  infantile  strain  is  unquestioned,  and,  apart 
from  the  problem  of  his  sexual  temperament,  Leonardo 
was  a  child  even  in  his  extraordinary  delight  in  devis¬ 
ing  fantastic  toys  and  contriving  disconcerting  tricks. 
His  more  than  feminine  tenderness  is  equally  clear, 
alike  in  his  pictures  and  in  his  life.  Isabella  d?  Este,  in 


124 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


asking  him  to  paint  the  boy  Jesus  in  the  Temple, 
justly  referred  to  “the  gentleness  and  sweetness  which 
mark  your  art."  His  tenderness  was*  shown  not  only 
towards  human  beings,  but  to  all  living  things,  animals 
and  even  plants,  and  it  would  appear  that  he  was  a 
vegetarian.  Yet  at  the  same  time  he  was  emphatically 
masculine,  altogether  free  from  weakness  or  softness. 
He  delighted  in  ugliness  as  well  as  in  beauty;  he  liked 
visiting  the  hospitals  to  study  the  sick  in  his  thirst  for 
knowledge;  he  pondered  over  battles  and  fighting;  he 
showed  no  compunction  in  planning  devilish  engines 
of  military  destruction.  His  mind  was  of  a  definitely 
realistic  and  positive  cast;  though  there  seems  no 
field  of  thought  he  failed  to  enter,  he  never  touched 
metaphysics,  and  though  his  worship  of  Nature  has 
the  emotional  tone  of  religion,  even  of  ecstasy,  he  was 
clearly  disdainful  of  the  established  religions,  and  per¬ 
petually  shocked  “the  timid  friends  of  God.”  By  pre¬ 
cept  and  by  practice  he  proclaimed  the  lofty  solitude 
of  the  individual  soul,  and  he  felt  only  contempt  for  the 
herd.  We  see  how  this  temper  became  impressed  on 
his  face  in  his  own  drawing  of  himself  in  old  age,  with 
that  intent  and  ruthless  gaze  wrapped  in  intellectual 
contemplation  of  the  outspread  world. 

Leonardo  comes  before  us,  indeed,  in  the  end,  as  a 
figure  for  awe  rather  than  for  love.  Yet,  as  the  noblest 
type  of  the  Overman  we  faintly  try  to  conceive,  Leo¬ 
nardo  is  the  foe,  not  of  man,  but  of  the  enemies  of  man. 
The  great  secrets  that  with  clear  vision  his  stern  grip 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


125 


tore  from  Nature,  the  new  instruments  of  power  that 
his  energy  wrought,  they  were  all  for  the  use  and  delight 
of  mankind.  So  Leonardo  is  the  everlasting  embodi¬ 
ment  of  that  brooding  human  spirit  whose  task  never 
dies.  Still  to-day  it  stands  at  the  mouth  of  the  gloomy 
cavern  of  Nature,  even  of  Human  Nature,  with  bent 
back  and  shaded  eyes,  seeking  intently  to  penetrate 
the  gloom  beyond,  with  the  fear  of  that  threatening 
darkness,  with  the  desire  of  what  redeeming  miracle  it 
yet  perchance  may  hold. 


V 

That  Leonardo  da  Vinci  was  not  only  supremely  great 
in  science,  but  the  incarnation  of  the  spirit  of  science, 
the  artist  and  lover  of  Nature,  is  a  fact  it  is  well  to 
bear  in  mind.  Many  mistakes  would  be  avoided  if  it 
were  more  clearly  present  to  consciousness.  We  should 
no  longer  find  the  artists  in  design  absurdly  chafing 
under  what  they  considered  the  bondage  of  the  artists 
in  thought.  It  would  no  longer  be  possible,  as  it  was 
some  years  ago,  and  may  be  still,  for  a  narrow-minded 
pedagogue  like  Brunetiere,  however  useful  in  his  own 
field,  10  be  greeted  as  a  prophet  when  he  fatuously 
proclaimed  what  he  termed  “the  bankruptcy  of  sci¬ 
ence.”  Unfortunately  so  many  of  the  people  who 
masquerade  under  the  name  of  “men  of  science”  have 
no  sort  of  title  to  that  name.  They  may  be  doing  good 
and  honest  work  by  accumulating  in  little  cells  the  facts 
which  others,  more  truly  inspired  by  the  spirit  of  sci- 


126 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


ence,  may  one  day  work  on ;  they  may  be  doing  more 
or  less  necessary  work  by  the  application  to  practical 
life  of  the  discoveries  which  genuine  men  of  science 
have  made.  But  they  themselves  have  just  as  much, 
and  no  more,  claim  to  use  the  name  of  ‘‘science”  as 
the  men  who  make  the  pots  and  dishes  piled  up  in  a 
crockery  shop  have  to  use  the  name  of  “art.”  1  They 
have  not  yet  even  learnt  that  “science”  is  not  the  ac¬ 
cumulation  of  knowledge  in  the  sense  of  piling  up  iso¬ 
lated  facts,  but  the  active  organisation  of  knowledge, 
the  application  to  the  world  of  the  cutting  edge  of  a 
marvellously  delicate  instrument,  and  that  this  task  is 
impossible  without  the  widest  range  of  vision  and  the 
most  restless  fertility  of  imagination. 

Of  such  more  genuine  men  of  science  —  to  name  one 
whom  by  virtue  of  several  common  interests  I  was 
sometimes  privileged  to  come  near  —  was  Francis 
Galton.  He  was  not  a  professional  man  of  science;  he 
was  even  willing  that  his  love  of  science  should  be  ac¬ 
counted  simply  a  hobby.  From  the  standpoint  of  the 
ordinary  professional  scientific  man  he  was  probably 
an  amateur.  He  was  not  even,  as  some  have  been,  a 
learned  amateur.  I  doubt  whether  he  had  really 
mastered  the  literature  of  any  subject,  though  I  do  not 
doubt  that  that  mattered  little.  When  he  heard  of 

1  Morley  Roberts,  who  might  be  regarded  as  a  pupil  in  the  school  of 
Leonardo  and  trained  like  him  in  the  field  of  art,  has  in  various  places  of 
his  suggestive  book,  Warfare  in  the  Human  Body,  sprinkled  irony  over 
the  examples  he  has  come  across  of  ignorant  specialists  claiming  to  be 
men  of  “science.” 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  127 

some  famous  worker  in  a  field  he  was  exploring,  he 
would  look  up  that  man’s  work;  so  it  was  with  Weis- 
mann  in  the  field  of  heredity.  And,  as  I  would  note 
with  a  smile  in  reading  his  letters,  Galton  was  not  able 
to  spell  Weismann’s  name  correctly.1  His  attitude  in 
science  might  be  said  to  be  pioneering  much  like  that 
of  the  pioneers  of  museums  in  the  later  seventeenth 
and  earlier  eighteenth  centuries,  men  like  Tradescant 
and  Ashmole  and  Evelyn  and  Sloane :  an  insatiable  cu¬ 
riosity  in  things  that  were  only:  just  beginning,  or  had 
not  yet  begun,  to  arouse  curiosity.  So  it  was  that  when 
I  made  some  personal  experiments  with  the  Mexican 
cactus,  mescal  (Anhalonium  Lewinii) ,  to  explore  its 
vision-producing  qualities,  then  quite  unknown  in 
England,  Galton  was  eagerly  interested  and  wanted  to 
experiment  on  himself,  though  ultimately  dissuaded 
on  account  of  his  advanced  age.  But,  on  this  basis, 
Galton’s  curiosity  was  not  the  mere  inquisitiveness  of 
the  child,  it  was  coordinated  with  an  almost  uniquely 
organised  brain  as  keen  as  it  was  well-balanced.  So 
that  on  the  one  hand  his  curiosity  was  transformed 
into  methods  that  were  endlessly  ingenious  and  in¬ 
ventive,  and  on  the  other  it  was  guided  and  held  in 
check  by  inflexible  caution  and  good  sense.  And  he 
knew  how  to  preserve  that  exquisite  balance  without 

1  Needless  to  say,  I  do  not  mention  this  to  belittle  Galton.  A  careful 
attention  to  words,  which  in  its  extreme  form  becomes  pedantry,  is  by 
no  means  necessarily  associated  with  a  careful  attention  to  things.  Until 
recent  times  English  writers,  even  the  greatest,  were  always  negligent  in 
spelling;  it  would  be  foolish  to  suppose  they  were  therefore  negligent 
in  thinking. 


128 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


any  solemnity  or  tension  or  self-assertion,  but  play¬ 
fully  and  graciously,  with  the  most  unfailing  modesty. 
It  was  this  rare  combination  of  qualities  —  one  may 
see  it  all  in  his  “Inquiries  into  Human  Faculty”  — 
which  made  him  the  very  type  of  the  man  of  genius, 
operating,  not  by  profession  or  by  deliberate  training, 
but  by  natural  function,  throwing  light  on  the  dark 
places  of  the  world  and  creating  science  in  out-of-the- 
way  fields  of  human  experience  which  before  had  been 
left  to  caprice  or  not  even  perceived  at  all.  Through¬ 
out  he  was  an  artist  and  if,  as  is  reported,  he  spent  the 
last  year  of  his  life  chiefly  in  writing  a  novel,  that  was 
of  a  piece  with  the  whole  of  his  marvellous  activity; 
he  had  never  been  doing  anything  else.  Only  his 
romances  were  real. 

Galton’s  yet  more  famous  cousin,  Charles  Darwin, 
presents  in  equal  purity  the  lover  and  the  artist  in  the 
sphere  of  Nature  and  Science.  No  doubt  there  were 
once  many  obtuse  persons  to  whom  these  names 
seemed  scarcely  to  fit  when  applied  to  Darwin.  There 
have  been  people  to  whom  Darwin  scarcely  seemed  a 
man  of  genius,  merely  a  dry  laborious  pedestrian 
student  of  facts.  He  himself  even  —  as  many  people 
find  it  difficult  to  forget  —  once  lamented  his  indiffer¬ 
ence  to  poetry  and  art.  But  Darwin  was  one  of  those 
elect  persons  in  whose  subconscious,  if  not  in  their 
conscious,  nature  is  implanted  the  realisation  that 
“science  is  poetry,”  and  in  a  field  altogether  remote 
the  poetry  and  art  of  convention  he  was  alike 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING  129 

poet  and  artist.  Only  a  man  so  endowed  could  from  a 
suggestion  received  on  reading  Mai  thus  have  con¬ 
ceived  of  natural  selection  as  a  chief  moulding  creative 
force  of  an  infinite  succession  of  living  forms;  so  also  of 
his  fantastic  theory  of  pangenesis.  Even  in  trifling  mat¬ 
ters  of  experiment,  such  as  setting  a  musician  to  play 
the  bassoon  in  his  greenhouse,  to  ascertain  whether 
music  affected  plants,  he  had  all  the  inventive  imagina¬ 
tion  of  poet  or  of  artist.  He  was  poet  and  artist  — 
though  I  doubt  if  this  has  been  pointed  out  —  in  his 
whole  attitude  towards  Nature.  He  worked  hard,  but 
to  him  work  was  a  kind  of  play,  and  it  may  well  be 
that  with  his  fragile  health  he  could  not  have  carried 
on  his  work  if  it  had  not  been  play.  Again  and  again 
in  his  “Life  and  Letters”  we  find  the  description  of 
his  observations  or  experiments  introduced  by  some 
such  phrase  as:  “I  was  infinitely  amused.”  And  he  re¬ 
marks  of  a  biological  problem  that  it  was  like  a  game 
of  chess.  I  doubt,  indeed,  whether  any  great  man  of 
science  was  more  of  an  artist  than  Darwin,  more  con¬ 
sciously  aware  that  he  was  playing  with  the  world, 
more  deliciously  thrilled  by  the  fun  of  life.  That  man 
may  well  have  found  “poetry  and  art”  dull  who  himself 
had  created  the  theory  of  sexual  selection  which  made 
the  whole  becoming  of  life  art  and  the  .secret  of  it 
poetry.1' 

1  Darwin  even  overestimated  the  aesthetic  element  in  his  theory  of 
sexual  selection,  and  (I  have  had  occasion  elsewhere  to  point  out)  un¬ 
necessarily  prejudiced  that  theory  by  sometimes  unwarily  assuming  a 
conscious  .esthetic  element. 


130 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


It  is  not  alone  among  biologists,  from  whose  stand¬ 
point  it  may  be  judged  easier  to  reach,  since  they  are 
concerned  with  living  Nature,  that  we  find  the  attitude 
of  the  lover  and  the  artist.  We  find  it  just  as  well 
marked  when  the  man  of  genius  plays  in  what  some 
might  think  the  arid  field  of  the  physicist.  Faraday 
worked  in  a  laboratory,  a  simple  one,  indeed,  but  the 
kind  of  place  which  might  be  supposed  fatal  to  the 
true  spirit  of  science,  and  without  his  researches  in 
magnetic  electricity  we  might  have  missed,  with  or 
without  a  pang,  those  most  practical  machines  of  our 
modern  life,  the  dynamo  and  the  telephone.  Yet  Fara¬ 
day  had  no  practical  ends  in  view;  it  has  been  possible 
to  say  of  him  that  he  investigated  Nature  as  a  poet 
investigates  the  emotions.  That  would  not  have  suf¬ 
ficed  to  make  him  the  supreme  man  of  science  he  was. 
His  biographer,  Dr.  Bence  Jones,  who  knew  him  well, 
concludes  that  Faraday’s  first  great  characteristic  was 
his  trust  in  facts,  and  his  second  his  imagination. 
There  we  are  brought  to  the  roots  of  his  nature.  Only, 
it  is  important  to  remember,  these  two  characteristics 
were  not  separate  and  distinct.  In  themselves  they 
may  be  opposing  traits;  it  was  because  in  Faraday 
they  were  held  together  in  vital  tension  that  he  be¬ 
came  so  potent  an  instrument  of  research  into  Nature’s 
secrets.  Tyndall,  who  was  his  friend  and  fellow  worker, 
seems  to  have  perceived  this.  4 ‘The  force  of  his  imag¬ 
ination,”  wrote  Tyndall,  “ was  enormous,”  —  he“rose 
from  the  smallest  beginnings  to  the  greatest  ends.” 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


13* 

from  “bubbles  of  oxygen  and  nitrogen  to  the  atmos^ 
pheric  envelope  of  the  earth  itself,”  —  but  “he  bridled 
it  like  a  mighty  rider.”  Faraday  himself  said  to  the 
same  effect:  “Let  the  imagination  go,  guarding  it  by 
judgment  and  principles,  but  holding  it  in  and  direct¬ 
ing  it  by  experiment.”  Elsewhere  he  has  remarked 
that  in  youth  he  was,  and  he  might  have  added  that 
he  still  remained,  “a  very  lively  imaginative  person 
and  could  believe  in  the  ‘Arabian  Nights’  as  easily  as 
in  the  ‘Encyclopaedia  ‘  ”  But  he  soon  acquired  almost 
an  instinct  for  testing  facts  by  experiment,  for  dis¬ 
trusting  such  alleged  facts  as  he  had  not  so  tested,  and 
for  accepting  all  the  conclusions  that  he  had  thus 
reached  with  a  complete  indifference  to  commonly 
accepted  beliefs.  (It  is  true  he  was  a  faithful  and  de¬ 
vout  elder  in  the  Sandemanian  Church,  and  that  is 
not  the  least  fascinating  trait  in  this  fascinating  man.) 
Tyndall  has  insisted  on  both  of  these  aspects  of  Fara¬ 
day’s  mental  activity.  He  had  “wonderful  vivacity,” 
he  was  “a  man  of  excitable  and  fiery  nature,”  and 
“underneath  his  sweetness  was  the  heat  of  a  volcano.” 
He  himself  believed  that  there  was  a  Celtic  strain  in  his 
heredity;  there  was  a  tradition  that  the  family  came 
from  Ireland;  I  cannot  find  that  there  are  any  Fara¬ 
days,  or  people  of  any  name  resembling  Faraday,  now 
in  Ireland,  but  Tyndall,  being  himself  an  Irishman, 
liked  to  believe  that  the  tradition  was  sound.  It  would 
only  account  for  the  emotionally  vivacious  side  of  this 
nature.  There  was  also  the  other  side,  on  w  hich  Tyn- 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


*32 

dall  also  insists:  the  love  of  order,  the  extreme  tenacity, 
the  high  self-discipline  able  to  convert  the  fire  within 
into  a  clear  concentrated  glow.  In  the  fusion  of  these 
two  qualities  “he  was  a  prophet,”  says  Tyndall,  “and 
often  wrought  by  an  inspiration  to  be  understood  by 
sympathy  alone.”  His  expansive  emotional  imagina¬ 
tion  became  the  servant  of  truth,  and  sprang  into  life 
at  its  touch.  In  carrying  out  physical  experiments  he  , 
would  experience  a  childlike  joy  and  his  eyes  sparkled. 
“Even  to  his  latest  days  he  would  almost  dance  for 
joy  at  being  shown  a  new  experiment.”  Silvanus 
Thompson,  in  his  book  on  Faraday,  insists  (as  Tyndall 
had)  on  the  association  with  this  childlike  joy  in  im¬ 
aginative  extravagance  of  the  perpetual  impulse  to  test 
and  to  prove,  “yet  never  hesitating  to  push  to  their 
logical  conclusions  the  ideas  suggested  by  experiment, 
however  widely  they  might  seem  to  lead  from  the 
accepted  modes  of  thought.”  His  method  was  the 
method  of  the  “Arabian  Nights,”  transferred  to  the 
region  of  facts. 

Faraday  was  not  a  mathematician.  But  if  we  turn 
to  Kepler,  who  moved  in  the  sphere  of  abstract  calcula- 

J0-' 

tion,  we  find  precisely  the  same  combination  of  charac¬ 
teristics.  It  was  to  Kepler,  rather  than  to  Copernicus, 
that  we  owe  the  establishment  of  the  heliocentric  the¬ 
ory  of  our  universe,  and  Kepler,  more  than  any  man, 
was  the  precursor  of  Newton.  It  has  been  said  that  if 
Kepler  had  never  lived  it  is  difficult  to  conceive  who 
could  have  taken  his  place  and  achieved  his  special 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


133 


part  in  the  scientific  creation  of  our  universe.  For  that 
pioneering  part  was  required  a  singular  blend  of  seem¬ 
ingly  opposed  qualities.  Only  a  wildly  daring,  original, 
and  adventurous  spirit  could  break  away  from  the  age¬ 
long  traditions  and  rigid  preconceptions  which  had 
ruled  astronomy  for  thousands  of  years.  Only  an  end¬ 
lessly  patient,  careful,  laborious,  precise  investigator 
could  set  up  the  new  revolutionary  conceptions  needed 
to  replace  these  traditions  and  preconceptions.  Kepler 
supplied  this  rare  combination  of  faculties.  He  pos¬ 
sessed  the  most  absurdly  extravagant  imagination ;  he 
developed  a  greater  regard  for  accuracy  in  calcula¬ 
tion  than  the  world  had  ever  known.  He  was  willing  to 
believe  that  the  earth  was  a  kind  of  animal,  and  would 
not  have  been  surprised  to  find  that  it  possessed  lungs 
or  gills.  At  the  same  time  so  set  was  he  on  securing  the 
precise  truth,  so  patiently  laborious,  that  some  of  his 
most  elaborate  calculations  were  repeated,  and  without 
the  help  of  logarithms,  even  seventy  times.  The  two 
essential  qualities  that  make  the  supreme  artist  in  sci¬ 
ence  have  never  been  so  clearly  made  manifest  as  in 
Kepler. 

Kepler  may  well  bring  us  to  Einstein,  the  greatest 
pioneer  in  the  comprehension  of  the  universe  since  his 
day,  and,  indeed,  one  who  is  more  than  a  pioneer,  since 
he  already  seems  to  have  won  a  place  beside  Newton. 
It  is  a  significant  fact  that  Einstein,  though  he  pos¬ 
sesses  an  extremely  cautious,  critical  mind,  and  is  re¬ 
garded  as  conspicuous  for  his  common  sense,  has  a 


*34 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


profound  admiration  for  Kepler,  whom  he  frequently 
quotes.  For  Einstein  also  is  an  imaginative  artist.1 

Einstein  is  obviously  an  artist,  even  in  appearance, 
as  has  often  been  noted  by  those  who  have  met  him; 
“he  looks  far  more  the  musician  than  the  man  of  sci¬ 
ence, “  one  writes,  while  those  who  know  him  well  say 
that  he  is  “essentially  as  much  an  artist  as  a  discov¬ 
erer. M  As  a  matter  of  fact  he  is  an  artist  in  one  of  the 
most  commonly  recognised  arts,  being  an  accomplished 
musician,  a  good  violinist,  it  is  said,  while  improvisa¬ 
tion  on  the  piano,  he  himself  says,  is  “a  necessity  of  his 
life.”  His  face,  we  are  told,  is  illumined  when  he  listens 
to  music;  he  loves  Bach  and  Haydn  and  Mozart, 
Beethoven  and  Wagner  much  less,  while  to  Chopin, 
Schumann,  and  the  so-called  romantics  in  music,  as 
we  might  anticipate,  he  is  indifferent.  His  love  of 
music  is  inborn;  it  developed  when,  as  a  child,  he  would 
think  out  little  songs  “in  praise  of  God,”  and  sing 
them  by  himself;  music,  Nature,  and  God  began,  even 


1  It  is  probable  that  the  reason  why  it  is  often  difficult  to  trace  the 
imaginative  artist  in  great  men  of  supposedly  abstract  science  is  the 
paucity  of  intimate  information  about  them.  Even  their  scientific 
friends  have  rarely  had  the  patience,  or  even  perhaps  the  intelligence,  to 
observe  them  reverently  and  to  record  their  observations.  We  know 
almost  nothing  that  is  intimately  personal  about  Newton.  As  regards 
Einstein,  we  are  fortunate  in  possessing  the  book  of  Moszkowski,  Ein¬ 
stein  (translated  into  English  under  the  title  of  Einstein  the  Searcher ), 
which  contains  many  instructive  conversations  and  observations  by 
a  highly  intelligent  and  appreciative  admirer,  who  has  set  them  down 
in  a  Bosweilian  spirit  that  faintly  recalls  Eckermann’s  book  on  Goethe 
(which,  indeed,  Moszkowski  had  in  mind),  though  falling  far  short  of 
that  supreme  achievement.  The  statements  in  the  text  are  mainly 
gleaned  from  Moszkowski. 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


135 


at  that  early  age,  to  become  a  kind  of  unity  to  him. 
“Music,”  said  Leibnitz,  “is  the  pleasure  the  human 
soul  experiences  from  counting  without  being  aware 
that  it  is  counting.”  It  is  the  most  abstract,  the  most 
nearly  mathematical  of  the  arts  —  we  may  recall  how 
music  and  mathematics  had  their  scientific  origin  to¬ 
gether  in  the  discovery  of  Py thagoras  —  and  it  is  not 
surprising  that  it  should  be  Einstein’s  favorite  art.1  It 
is  even  more  natural  that,  next  to  music,  he  should 
be  attracted  to  architecture  —  the  art  which  Goethe 
called  “frozen  music”  —  for  here  we  are  actually 
plunged  into  mechanics,  here  statics  and  dynamics  are 
transformed  into  visible  beauty.  To  painting  he  is 
indifferent,  but  he  is  drawn  to  literature,  although  no 
great  reader.  In  literature,  indeed,  it  would  seem  that 
it  is  not  so  much  art  that  he  seeks  as  emotion ;  in  this 
field  it  is  no  longer  the  austerely  architectonic  that 
draws  him;  thus  he  is  not  attracted  to  Ibsen;  he  is 
greatly  attracted  to  Cervantes  as  well  as  Keller  and 
Strindberg;  he  has  a  profound  admiration  for  Shake¬ 
speare,  but  is  cooler  towards  Goethe,  while  it  would 
seem  that  there  is  no  writer  to  whom  he  is  more  fer¬ 
vently  attached  than  the  most  highly  emotional,  the 
most  profoundly  disintegrated  in  nervous  organisation 
of  all  great  writers,  Dostoievsky,  especially  his  master¬ 
piece,  “The  Brothers  Karamazov.”  “Dostoievsky 

1  Spengler  holds  ( Der  Untergang  des  Abendlandes ,  vol.  x,  p.  329)  that 
the  development  of  music  throughout  its  various  stages  in  our  European 
culture  really  has  been  closely  related  with  the  stages  ol  the  development 
ol  mathematics. 


136  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

gives  me  more  than  any  scientist,  more  than  Gauss." 
All  literary  analysis  or  aesthetic  subtlety,  it  seems  to 
Einstein,  fails  to  penetrate  to  the  heart  of  a  work  like 
“The  Karamazovs,”  it  can  only  be  grasped  by  the 
feelings.  His  face  lights  up  when  he  speaks  of  it  and  he 
can  find  no  word  but  “ethical  satisfaction.”  For  ethics 
in  the  ordinary  sense,  as  a  system,  means  little  to 
Einstein;  he  would  not  even  include  it  in  the  sciences; 
it  is  the  ethical  joy  embodied  in  art  which  satisfies  him. 
Moreover,  it  is  said,  the  keynote  of  Einstein’s  emo¬ 
tional  existence  is  the  cry  of  Sophocles’  Antigone:  “I 
am  not  here  to  hate  with  you,  but  to  love  with  you.” 
The  best  that  life  has  to  offer,  he  feels,  is  a  face  glowing 
with  happiness.  He  is  an  advanced  democrat  and  paci¬ 
fist  rather  than  (as  is  sometimes  supposed)  a  socialist; 
he  believes  in  the  internationality  of  all  intellectual 
work  and  sees  no  reason  why  this  should  destroy  na¬ 
tional  characteristics. 

Einstein  is  not  —  and  this  is  the  essential  point  to 
make  clear  —  merely  an  artist  in  his  moments  of  leis¬ 
ure  and  play,  as  a  great  statesman  may  play  golf  or  a 
great  soldier  grow  orchids.  He  retains  the  same  atti¬ 
tude  in  the  whole  of  his  work.  He  traces  science  to  its 
roots  in  emotion,  which  is  exactly  where  art  also  is 
rooted.  Of  Max  Planck,  the  physicist,  for  whom  he  has 
great  admiration,  Einstein  has  said:  “The  emotional 
condition  which  fits  him  for  his  task  is  akin  to  that  of  a 
devotee  or  a  lover.”  We  may  say  the  same,  it  would 
seem*  of  Einstein  himself.  He  is  not  even  to  be  in- 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


137 


eluded,  as  some  might  have  supposed,  in  that  rigid  sect 
which  asserts  that  all  real  science  is  precise  measure¬ 
ment  ;  he  recognises  that  the  biological  sciences  must  be 
largely  independent  of  mathematics.  If  mathematics 
were  the  only  path  of  science,  he  once  remarked,  Na¬ 
ture  would  have  been  illegible  for  Goethe,  who  had  a 
non-mathematical,  even  anti-mathematical,  mind,  and 
yet  possessed  a  power  of  intuition  greater  than  that  of 
many  an  exact  investigator.1  All  great  achievements 
in  science,  he  holds,  start  from  intuition.  This  he  con¬ 
stantly  repeats,  although  he  adds  that  the  intuition 
must  not  stand  alone,  for  invention  also  is  required. 
He  is  disposed  to  regard  many  scientific  discoveries 
commonly  regarded  the  work  of  pure  thought  as  really 
works  of  art.  He  would  have  this  view  embodied  in  all 
education,  making  education  a  free  and  living  process, 
with  no  drilling  of  the  memory  and  no  examinations, 
mainly  a  process  of  appeal  to  the  senses  in  order  to 
draw  out  delicate  reactions.  With  his  end,  and  even 
for  the  sake  of  acquiring  ethical  personality,  he  would 
have  every  child  learn  a  handicraft,  joinery,  bookbind- 
ing,  or  other,  and,  like  Elie  Faure,2  he  has  great  faith  in 

1  I  would  here  refer  to  a  searching  investigation,  “Goethe  und  die 
mathematische  Fhysik:  Eine  Erkenntnistheoretische  Studie,”  in  Ernst 
Cassirer’s  Idee  und  Gestalt  (1921).  It  is  here  shown  that  in  some  respects 
Goethe  pointed  the  way  along  which  mathematical  physics,  by  following 
its  own  paths,  has  since  travelled,  and  that  even  when  most  non-mathe¬ 
matical  Goethe’s  scientific  attitude  was  justifiable. 

2  See  the  remarkable  essay,  “De  la  Cineplastique,”  in  filie  Faure’s 
L'Arbre  d’lLden  (1922).  It  is,  however,  a  future  and  regenerated  cinema 
for  which  Elie  Faure  looks,  “to  become  the  art  of  the  crowd,  the  powerful 
centre  of  communion  in  which  new  symphonic  forms  will  be  born  in  the 
tumult  of  passions  and  utilized  for  fine  and  elevating  aesthetic  ends." 


138  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

the  educational  value  of  the  cinema.  We  see  that  be¬ 
hind  all  Einstein’s  activity  lies  the  conception  that 
the  physicist’s  work  is  to  attain  a  picture,  “a  world- 
picture,”  as  he  calls  it.  “  I  agree  with  Schopenhauer,” 
Einstein  said  at  a  celebration  in  honour  of  Planck  in 
1918,  “that  one  of  the  most  powerful  motives  that  at¬ 
tract  people  to  science  and  art  is  the  longing  to  escape 
from  everyday  life  with  its  painful  coarseness  and  des¬ 
olating  bareness,  and  to  break  the  fetters  of  their  own 
ever-changing  desires.  It  impels  those  of  keener  sensi¬ 
bility  out  of  their  personal  existences  into  the  world  of 
objective  perception  and  understanding.  It  is  a  motive 
force  of  like  kind  to  that  which  drives  the  dweller  in 
noisy  confused  cities  to  restful  Alpine  heights  whence 
he  seems  to  have  an  outlook  on  eternity.  Associated 
with  this  negative  motive  is  the  positive  motive  which 
impels  men  to  seek  a  simplified  synoptic  view  of  the 
world  conformable  to  their  own  nature,  overcoming 
the  world  by  replacing  it  with  this  picture.  The  painter, 
the  poet,  the  philosopher,  the  scientist,  all  do  this,  each 
in  his  own  way.”  Spengler  has  elaborately  argued  that 
there  is  a  perfect  identity  of  physics,  mathematics,  re¬ 
ligion,  and  great  art.1  We  might  fairly  be  allowed  to 
point  to  Einstein  as  a  lofty  embodiment  of  that  iden¬ 
tity. 

Here,  where  we  reach  the  sphere  of  mathematics,  we 
are  among  processes  which  seem  to  some  the  most 
inhuman  of  all  human  activities  and  the  most  remote 

*  O.  Spengler,  Der  Untergang  dcs  Abcndlandes,  vol.  1,  p.  576. 


THE  ART  OF  THINKING 


139 

from  poetry.  Yet  it  is  here  that  the  artist  has  the  full¬ 
est  scope  for  his  imagination.  “Mathematics,”  says 
Bertrand  Russell  in  his  “Mysticism  and  Logic,”  “may 
be  defined  as  the  subject  in  which  we  never  know  what 
we  are  talking  about,  nor  whether  what  we  are  saying 
is  true.”  We  are  in  the  imaginative  sphere  of  art,  and 
the  mathematician  is  engaged  in  a  work  of  creation 
which  resembles  music  in  its  orderliness,  and  is  yet  re¬ 
producing  on  another  plane  the  order  of  the  universe, 
and  so  becoming  as  it  were  a  music  of  the  spheres.  It 
is  not  surprising  that  the  greatest  mathematicians 
have  again  and  again  appealed  to  the  arts  in  order  to 
find  some  analogy  to  their  own  work.  They  have  indeed 
found  it  in  the  most  various  arts,  in  poetry,  in  painting, 
in  sculpture,  although  it  would  certainly  seem  that  it  is 
in  music,  the  most  abstract  of  the  arts,  the  art  of  num¬ 
ber  and  of  time,  that  we  find  the  closest  analogy.  “The 
mathematician’s  best  work  is  art,”  said  Mittag-Lefler, 
“a  high  and  perfect  art,  as  daring  as  the  most  secret 
dreams  of  imagination,  clear  and  limpid.  Mathemati¬ 
cal  genius  and  artistic  genius  touch  each  other.”  And 
Sylvester  wrote  in  his  “Theory  of  Reciprocants” : 
“Does  it  not  seem  as  if  Algebra  had  attained  to  the 
dignity  of  a  fine  art,  in  which  the  workman  has  a  free 
hand  to  develop  his  conceptions,  as  in  a  musical  theme 
or  a  subject  for  painting?  It  has  reached  a  point  in 
which  every  properly  developed  algebraical  composi¬ 
tion,  like  a  skilful  landscape,  is  expected  to  suggest  the 
notion  of  an  infinite  distance  lying  beyond  the  limits 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


140 

of  the  canvas.”  “  Mathematics,  rightly  viewed,”  says 
Bertrand  Russell  again,  ‘‘possesses  not  only  truth,  but 
supreme  beauty — a  beauty  cold  and  austere,  like  that 
of  sculpture.  .  .  .  The  true  spirit  of  delight,  the  exalta¬ 
tion,  the  sense  of  being  more  than  man,  which  is  the 
touchstone  of  the  highest  excellence,  is  to  be  found  in 
mathematics  as  surely  as  in  poetry.” 

The  mathematician  has  reached  the  highest  rung  on 
the  ladder  of  human  thought.  But  it  is  the  same  lad¬ 
der  which  we  have  all  of  us  been  always  ascending,  alike 
from  the  infancy  of  the  individual  and  the  infancy  of 
the  race.  MolRre’s  Jourdainhad  been  speaking  prose 
for  more  than  forty  years  without  knowing  it.  Man¬ 
kind  has  been  thinking  poetry  throughout  its  long 
career  and  remained  equally  ignorant* 


CHAPTER  IV 
THE  ART  OF  WRITING 

I 

From  time  to  time  we  are  solemnly  warned  that  in  the 
hands  of  modern  writers  language  has  fallen  into  a 
morbid  state.  It  has  become  degenerate,  if  not,  indeed, 
the  victim  of  “senile  ataxy”  or  “general  paralysis.” 
Certainly  it  is  well  that  our  monitors  should  seek  to 
arouse  in  us  the  wholesome  spirit  of  self-criticism. 
Whether  we  write  ill  or  well,  we  can  never  be  too  seri¬ 
ously  concerned  with  what  it  is  that  we  are  attempting 
to  do.  We  may  always  be  grateful  to  those  who  stimu¬ 
late  us  to  a  more  wakeful  activity  in  pursuing  a  task 
which  can  never  be  carried  to  perfection. 

Yet  these  monitors  seldom  fail  at  the  same  time  to 
arouse  a  deep  revolt  in  our  minds.  We  are  not  only 
impressed  by  the  critic’s  own  inability  to  write  any 
better  than  those  he  criticises.  We  are  moved  to  ques¬ 
tion  the  validity  of  nearly  all  the  rules  he  lays  down  for 
our  guidance.  We  are  inclined  to  dispute  altogether 
the  soundness  of  the  premises  from  which  he  starts. 
Of  these  three  terms  of  our  revolt,  covering  compre¬ 
hensively  the  whole  ground,  the  first  may  be  put  aside 
—  since  the  ancient  retort  is  always  ineffective  and  it 
helps  the  patient  not  at  all  to  bid  the  physician  heal 
himself  —  and  we  may  take  the  last  first. 


142 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


Men  are  always  apt  to  bow  down  before  the  superior 
might  of  their  ancestors.  It  has  been  so  always  and 
everywhere.  Even  the  author  of  the  once  well-known 
book  of  Genesis  believed  that  “there  were  giants  in 
the  earth  in  those  days,”  the  mighty  men  which  were 
of  old,  the  men  of  renown,  and  still  to-day  among  our¬ 
selves  no  plaint  is  more  common  than  that  concerning 
the  physical  degeneracy  of  modern  men  as  compared 
with  our  ancestors  of  a  few  centuries  ago.  Now  and 
then,  indeed,  there  comes  along  a  man  of  science,  like 
Professor  Parsons,  who  has  measured  the  bones  from 
the  remains  of  the  ancestors  we  still  see  piled  up  in  the 
crypt  at  Hythe,  and  finds  that  —  however  fine  the 
occasional  exceptions  —  the  average  height  of  those 
men  and  women  was  decidedly  less  than  that  of  their 
present-day  descendants.  Fortunately  for  the  vitality 
of  tradition,  we  cherish  a  wholesome  distrust  of  science. 
And  so  it  is  with  our  average  literary  stature.  The 
academic  critic  regards  himself  as  the  special  deposi¬ 
tory  of  the  accepted  tradition,  and  far  be  it  from  him  to 
condescend  to  any  mere  scientific  inquiry  into  the 
actual  facts.  He  half  awakens  from  slumber  to  mur¬ 
mur  the  expected  denunciation  of  his  own  time,  and 
therewith  returns  to  slumber.  He  usually  seems  un¬ 
aware  that  even  three  centuries  ago,  in  the  finest  period 
of  English  prose,  Swift,  certainly  himself  a  supreme 
master,  was  already  lamenting  “the  corruption  of  our 
style.” 

If  it  is  asserted  that  the  average  writer  of  to-day  has 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


143 


not  equalled  the  supreme  writer  of  some  earlier  age,  — • 
there  are  but  one  or  two  in  any  age,  —  we  can  only 
ejaculate:  Strange  if  he  had!  Yet  that  is  all  that  the 
academic  critic  usually  seems  to  mean.  If  he  would 
take  the  trouble  to  compare  the  average  prose  writer 
of  to-day  with  the  average  writer  of  even  so  great  an 
age  as  the  Elizabethan,  he  might  easily  convince  him¬ 
self  that  the  former,  whatever  his  imperfections,  need 
not  fear  the  comparison.  Whether  or  not  Progress  in 
general  may  be  described  as  4 ‘the  exchange  of  one 
nuisance  for  another  nuisance,”  it  is  certainly  so  with 
the  progress  of  style,  and  the  imperfections  of  our 
average  everyday  writing  are  balanced  by  the  quite 
other  imperfections  of  our  forefathers’  writing.  What, 
for  instance,  need  we  envy  in  the  literary  methods  of 
that  great  and  miscellaneous  band  of  writers  whom 
Hakluyt  brought  together  in  those  admirable  volumes 
which  are  truly  great  and  really  fascinating  only  for 
reasons  that  have  nothing  to  do  with  style?  Raleigh 
himself  here  shows  no  distinction  in  his  narrative  of 
that  discreditable  episode,  —  as  he  clearly  and  rightly 
felt  it  to  be,  —  the  loss  of  the  Revenge  by  the  wilful 
Grenville.  Most  of  them  are  bald,  savourless,  monot¬ 
onous,  stating  the  obvious  facts  in  the  obvious  way, 
but  hopelessly  failing  to  make  clear,  when  rarely  they 
attempt  it,  anything  that  is  not  obvious.  They  have 
none  of  the  little  unconscious  tricks  of  manner  which 
worry  the  critic  to-day.  But  their  whole  manner  is  one 
commonplace  trick  from  which  they  never  escape. 


144  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

They  are  only  relieved  by  its  simplicity  and  by  the 
novelty  which  comes  through  age.  We  have  to  re¬ 
member  that  all  mediocrity  is  impersonal  and  that 
when  we  encourage  its  manifestations  on  printed 
pages  we  merely  make  mediocrity  more  conspicuous. 
Nor  can  that  be  remedied  by  teaching  the  mediocre  to 
cultivate  tricks  of  fashion  or  of  vanity.  There  is  more 
personality  in  Claude  Bernard's  ^Legons  de  Physi¬ 
ologic  Exp6rimen  tales,”  a  great  critic  of  life  and  letters 
has  pointed  out,  Remy  de  Gourmont,  than  in  Musset’s 
“  Confession  d’un  Enfant  du  Si£cle.”  For  personality 
is  not  something  that  can  be  sought;  it  is  a  radiance 
that  is  diffused  spontaneously.  It  may  even  be  most 
manifest  when  most  avoided,  and  no  writer  —  the 
remark  has  doubtless  often  been  made  before  —  can 
be  more  personal  than  Flaubert  who  had  made  almost 
a  gospel  of  Impersonality.  But  the  absence  of  re¬ 
search  for  personality,  however  meritorious,  will  not 
suffice  to  bring  personality  out  of  mediocrity. 

Moreover,  the  obvious  fact  seems  often  to  be  over¬ 
looked  by  the  critic  that  a  vastly  larger  proportion  of 
the  population  now  write,  and  see  their  writing  printed. 
We  live  in  what  we  call  a  democratic  age  in  which  all 
are  compulsorily  taught  how  to  make  pothooks  and 
hangers  on  paper.  So  that  every  nincompoop  —  in 
the  attenuated  sense  of  the  term  —  as  soon  as  he  puts 
a  pen  in  ink  feels  that  he  has  become,  like  M.  Jourdain, 
a  writer  of  prose.  That  feeling  is  justified  only  in  2 
very  limited  sense,  and  if  we  wish  to  compare  the  condi- 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


T45 


tion  of  things  to-day  with  that  in  an  age  when  people 
wrote  at  the  bidding  of  some  urgent  stimulus  from 
without  or  from  within,  we  have  at  the  outset  to  delete 
certainly  over  ninety-five  per  cent  of  our  modern 
so-called  writers  before  we  institute  any  comparison. 
The  writers  thus  struck  out,  it  may  be  added,  cannot 
fail  to  include  many  persons  of  much  note  in  the 
world.  There  are  all  sorts  of  people  to-day  who  write 
from  all  sorts  of  motives  other  than  a  genuine  aptitude 
for  writing.  To  suppose  that  there  can  be  any  com¬ 
parison  at  this  point  of  the  present  with  the  past  and 
to  dodder  over  the  decay  of  our  language  would  seem  a 
senile  proceeding  if  we  do  not  happen  to  know  that  it 
occurs  in  all  ages,  and  that,  even  at  the  time  when  our 
prose  speech  was  as  near  to  perfection  as  it  is  ever 
likely  to  be,  its  critics  were  bemoaning  its  corruption, 
lamenting,  for  instance,  the  indolent  new  practice  of 
increasing  sibilation  by  changing  “arriveth”  into 
“arrives”  and  pronouncing  “walked”  as  “walkd,” 
sometimes  in  their  criticisms  showing  no  more  knowl¬ 
edge  of  the  history  and  methods  of  growth  of  English 
than  our  academic  critics  show  to-day. 

For  we  know  what  to-day  they  tell  us;  it  is  not  hard 
to  know,  their  exhortations,  though  few,  are  repeated 
in  so  psittaceous  a  manner.  One  thinks,  for  instance, 
of  that  solemn  warning  against  the  enormity  of  the 
split  infinitive  which  has  done  so  much  to  aggravate 
the  Pharisaism  of  the  bad  writers  who  scrupulously 
avoid  it.  This  superstition  seems  to  have  had  its 


146  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

origin  in  a  false  analogy  with  Latin  in  which  the 
infinitive  is  never  split  for  the  good  reason  that  it  is 
impossible  to  split.  In  the  greater  freedom  of  English 
it  is  possible  and  has  been  done  for  at  least  the  last  five 
hundred  years  by  the  greatest  masters  of  English; 
only  the  good  writer  never  uses  this  form  helplessly 
and  involuntarily,  but  with  a  definite  object;  and  that 
is  the  only  rule  to  observe.  An  absolute  prohibition 
in  this  matter  is  the  mark  of  those  who  are  too  igno¬ 
rant,  or  else  too  unintelligent,  to  recognise  a  usage 
which  is  of  the  essence  of  English  speech.1 

One  may  perhaps  refer,  again,  to  those  who  lay 
down  that  every  sentence  must  end  on  a  significant 
word,  never  on  a  preposition,  and  who  reprobate 
what  has  been  technically  termed  the  post-habited 
prefix.  They  are  the  same  worthy  and  would-be  old- 
fashioned  people  who  think  that  a  piece  of  music  must 
always  end  monotonously  on  a  banging  chord.  Only 
here  they  have  not,  any  more  than  in  music,  even  the 
virtue  —  if  such  it  be  —  of  old  fashion,  for  the  final  so- 
called  preposition  is  in  the  genius  of  the  English  lan¬ 
guage  and  associated  with  the  Scandinavian  —  in  the 
wider  ancient  sense  Danish  —  strain  of  English,  one 
of  the  finest  strains  it  owns,  imparting  much  of  the 
plastic  force  which  renders  it  flexible,  the  element 
which  helped  to  save  it  from  the  straitlaced  tendency 

1  It  may  be  as  well  to  point  that  it  is  the  amateur  literary  grammarian 
and  not  the  expert  who  is  at  fault  in  these  matters.  The  attitude  of  tin 
expert  (as  in  C.  T.  Onions,  Advanced  English  Syntax)  is  entirely  reason* 
able. 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


147 

of  Anglo-Saxon  and  the  awkward  formality  of  Latin 
and  French  influence.  The  foolish  prejudice  we  are 
here  concerned  with  seems  to  date  from  a  period  when 
the  example  of  French,  in  which  the  final  preposition 
is  impossible,  happened  to  be  dominant.  Its  use  in 
English  is  associated  with  the  informal  grace  and 
simplicity,  the  variety  of  tender  cadence,  which  our 
tongue  admits. 

In  such  matters  as  the  ‘‘split  infinitive ”  and  the 
“post-habited  preposition/’  there  should  never  have 
been  any  doubt  as  to  the  complete  validity  and  author¬ 
ity  of  the  questioned  usages.  But  there  are  other 
points  at  which  some  even  good  critics  may  be  tempted 
to  accept  the  condemnation  of  the  literary  grammari¬ 
ans.  It  is  sufficient  to  mention  one :  the  nominative  use 
of  the  pronoun  “me.”  Yet,  surely,  any  one  who  con¬ 
siders  social  practice  as  well  as  psychological  necessity 
should  not  fail  to  see  that  we  must  recognise  a  double 
use  of  “me”  in  English.  The  French,  who  in  such 
matters  seem  to  have  possessed  a  finer  social  and 
psychological  tact,  have  realised  that  je  cannot  be  the 
sole  nominative  of  the  first  person  and  have  supple¬ 
mented  it  by  moi  (mi  from  mihi).  The  Frenchman, 
when  asked  who  is  there,  does  not  reply  “Je!”  But 
the  would-be  English  purist  is  supposed  to  be  reduced 
to  replying  “  I ! ”  Royal  Cleopatra  asks  the  Messenger: 
“ Is  she  as  tall  as  me?”  The  would-be  purist  no  doubt 
transmutes  this  as  he  reads  into:  “  Is  she  as  tall  as  I?” 
We  need  not  envy  him. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


Such  an  example  indicates  how  independent  th€ 
free  and  wholesome  life  of  language  is  of  grammatical 
rules.  This  is  not  to  diminish  the  importance  of  the 
grammarian’s  task,  but  simply  to  define  it,  as  the 
formulator,  and  not  the  lawgiver,  of  usage.  His  rules 
are  useful,  not  merely  in  order  to  know  how  best  to 
keep  them,  but  in  order  to  know  how  best  to  break 
them.  Without  them  freedom  might  become  licence. 
Yet  even  licence,  we  have  to  recognise,  is  the  necessary 
oflscouring  of  speech  in  its  supreme  manifestations  of 
vitality  and  force.  English  speech  was  never  more 
syntactically  licentious  than  in  the  sixteenth  century, 
but  it  was  never  more  alive,  never  more  fitly  the  mate¬ 
rial  for  a  great  artist  to  mould.  So  it  is  that  in  the  six¬ 
teenth  century  we  find  Shakespeare.  In  post-Dryden 
days  (though  Dryden  was  an  excellent  writer  and 
engaged  on  an  admirable  task)  a  supreme  artist  in 
English  speech  became  impossible,  and  if  a  Shake¬ 
speare  had  appeared  all  his  strength  would  have  been 
wasted  in  a  vain  struggle  with  the  grammarians. 
French  speech  has  run  a  similar  and  almost  synchron¬ 
ous  course  with  English.  There  was  a  magnificently 
natural  force  and  wealth  in  sixteenth-century  French: 
in  Rabelais  it  had  been  even  extravagantly  exuberant ; 
in  Montaigne  it  is  still  flexible  and  various  —  ondoyant 
et  divers  —  and  still  full  of  natural  delight  and  freedom. 
But  after  Malherbe  and  his  fellows  French  speech 
acquired  orderliness,  precision,  and  formality;  they 
were  excellent  qualities,  no  doubt,  but  had  to  be  paid 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING  J49 

for  by  some  degree  of  thinness  and  primness,  even  some 
stiffening  of  the  joints.  Rousseau  came  and  poured 
fresh  blood  from  Switzerland  into  the  language  and  a 
new  ineffable  grace  that  was  all  his  own ;  so  that  if  we 
now  hesitate  to  say,  with  Landor,  that  he  excels  all  the 
moderns  for  harmony,  it  is  only  because  they  have 
learnt  what  he  taught;  and  the  later  Romantics,  under 
the  banner  of  Hugo,  imparted  colour  and  brilliance. 
Yet  all  the  great  artists  who  have  wrestled  with 
French  speech  for  a  century  have  never  been  able  to 
restore  the  scent  and  the  savour  and  the  substance 
which  Villon  and  Montaigne  without  visible  effort 
could  once  find  within  its  borders.  In  this  as  in  other 
matters  what  we  call  Progress  means  the  discovery  of 
new  desirable  qualities,  and  therewith  the  loss  of  other 
qualities  that  were  at  least  equally  desirable. 

Then  there  is  yet  another  warning  which,  especially 
in  recent  times,  is  issued  at  frequent  intervals,  and  that 
is  against  the  use  of  verbal  counters,  of  worn  or  even 
worn-out  phrases,  of  what  we  commonly  fall  back  on 
modern  French  to  call  cliches.  We  mean  thereby  the 
use  of  old  stereotyped  phrases  —  Goethe  called  them 
“stamped”  or  gestempelt  —  to  save  the  trouble  of 
making  a  new  living  phrase  to  suit  our  meaning.  The 
word  cliche  is  thus  typographic,  though,  it  so  happens, 
it  is  derived  from  an  old  French  word  of  phonetic 
meaning,  cliqueter  or  cliqucr  (related  to  the  German 
klatschen ),  which  we  already  have  in  English  as  to 
“click”  or  to  “clack,”  in  a  sense  which  well  supple- 


1 


150 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


ments  its  more  modern  technical  sense  for  this  literary 
end.  Yet  the  warning  against  cliches  is  vain.  The  good 
writer,  by  the  very  fact  that  he  is  alive  and  craves 
speech  that  is  vivid,  as  cliches  never  are,  instinctively 
avoids  their  excessive  use,  while  the  nervous  and  bad 
writer,  in  his  tremulous  anxiety  to  avoid  these  tabooed 
cliches ,  falls  into  the  most  deplorable  habits,  like  the 
late  Mr.  Robert  Ross,  who  at  one  time  was  so  anxious 
to  avoid  cliches  that  he  acquired  the  habit  of  using 
them  in  an  inverted  form  and  wrote  a  prose  that  made 
one  feel  like  walking  on  sharp  flints;  for,  though  a 
macadamized  road  may  not  be  so  good  to  walk  in  as 
a  flowered  meadow,  it  is  better  than  a  macadamized 
road  with  each  stone  turned  upside  down  and  the  sharp 
edge  uppermost.  As  a  matter  of  fact  it  is  impossible  to 
avoid  the  use  of  cliches  and  counters  in  speech,  and  if  it 
were  possible  the  results  would  be  in  the  highest  degree 
tedious  and  painful.  The  word  “  cliche ”  itself,  we  have 
seen,  is  a  cliche ,  a  worn  counter  of  a  word,  with  its 
original  meaning  all  effaced,  and  even  its  secondary 
meaning  now  only  just  visible.  That,  if  those  folk  who 
condemn  cliches  only  had  the  intelligence  to  perceive 
it,  is  a  significant  fact.  You  cannot  avoid  using  cliches , 
not  even  in  the  very  act  of  condemning  them.  They 
include,  if  we  only  look  keenly  enough,  nearly  the 
whole  of  language,  almost  every  separate  word.  If  one 
could  avoid  them  one  would  be  unintelligible.  Even 
those  common  phrases  which  it  is  peculiarly  meet  to 
call  counters  are  not  to  be  absolutely  condemned. 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


They  have  become  so  common  to  use  because  so  fit  to 
use,  as  Baudelaire  understood  when  he  spoke  of  “the 
immense  depth  of  thought  in  vulgar  locutions/’  1 
There  is  only  one  rule  to  follow  here,  —  and  it  is  simply 
the  rule  in  every  part  of  art,  —  to  know  what  one  is 
doing,  not  to  go  sheeplike  with  the  flock,  ignorantly, 
unthinkingly,  heedlessly,  but  to  mould  speech  to 
expression  the  most  truly  one  knows  how.  If,  indeed, 
we  are  seeking  clarity  and  the  precise  expression  of 
thought,  there  is  nothing  we  may  not  do  if  only 
we  know  how  to  do  it  —  but  that  “if”  might  well 
be  in  capitals.  One  who  has  spent  the  best  part  of 
his  life  in  trying  to  write  things  that  had  not  been 
written  before,  and  that  were  very  difficult  to  write, 
may  perhaps  be  allowed  to  confess  the  hardness  of 
this  task. 

To  write  is  thus  an  arduous  intellectual  task,  a 
process  which  calls  for  the  highest  tension  of  the 
muscles  in  the  escalade  of  a  heaven  which  the  strong¬ 
est  and  bravest  and  alertest  can  never  hope  to  take  by 
violence.  He  has  to  be  true,  —  whether  it  is  in  the 
external  world  he  is  working  or  in  his  own  internal 
world,  —  and  as  truth  can  only  be  seen  through  his 
own  temperament,  he  is  engaged  in  moulding  the 

1  It  is  interesting  to  note  that  another  aristocratic  master  of  speech 
had  also  made  just  the  same  observation.  Landor  puts  into  the  mouth  of 
Horne  Tooke  the  words:  “No  expression  can  become  a  vulgarism  which 
has  not  a  broad  foundation.  The  language  of  the  vulgar  hath  its  source 
in  physics:  in  known,  comprehended,  and  operative  things.”  At  the 
same  time  Landor  was  as  stern  a  judge  as  Baudelaire  of  the  random  use 
of  cliches . 


152 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


expression  of  a  combination  which  has  never  been  seen 
in  the  world  before. 

It  is  sometimes  said  that  the  great  writer  seldom 
quotes,  and  that  in  the  main  is  true,  for  he  finds  it 
difficult  to  mix  an  alien  music  of  thought  and  speech 
with  his  own.  Montaigne,  it  is  also  said,  is  an  excep¬ 
tion,  but  that  is  scarcely  true.  What  Montaigne  quoted 
he  often  translated  and  so  moulded  to  the  pattern  of 
his  own  mind.  The  same  may  be  said  of  Robert 
Burton.  If  it  had  not  been  so  these  writers  (almost 
certainly  Burton)  could  scarcely  have  attained  to  the 
rank  of  great  authors.  The  significant  fact  to  note, 
however,  is  not  that  the  great  writer  rarely  quotes, 
but  that  he  knows  how  to  quote.  Schopenhauer  was 
here  a  master.  He  possessed  a  marvellous  flair  for  fine 
sayings  in  remote  books,  and  these  he  would  now  and 
again  let  fall  like  jewels  on  his  page,  with  so  happy  a 
skill  that  they  seem  to  be  created  for  the  spot  on 
which  they  fell.  It  is  the  little  writer  rather  than  the 
great  writer  who  seems  never  to  quote,  and  the  reason 
is  that  he  is  really  never  doing  anything  else.1 

1  Speaking  as  a  writer  who  has  been  much  quoted,  —  it  ought  to  be  a 
satisfaction,  but  I  have  had  my  doubts,  —  I  may  say  that  I  have  ob 
served  that  those  who  quote  belong  mostly  to  two  classes,  one  consist¬ 
ing  of  good,  or  at  all  events  indifferent,  writers,  and  the  other  of  bad 
writers.  Those  of  the  first  class  quote  with  fair  precision  and  due  ac¬ 
knowledgement,  those  of  the  second  with  no  precision,  and  only  the 
vaguest  intimation,  or  none  at  all,  that  they  are  quoting.  This  would 
seem  to  indicate  that  the  good  writer  is  more  honest  than  the  bad  writer, 
but  that  conclusion  may  be  unjust  to  the  bad  writer.  The  fact  is  that, 
having  little  thought  or  knowledge  of  his  own,  he  is  not  fully  conscious 
of  what  he  is  doing.  He  is  like  a  greedy  child  who,  seeing  food  in  front  ol 
him,  snatches  it  at  random,  without  being  able  to  recognise  whether  or 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


153 

It  is  not  in  writing  only,  in  all  art,  in  all  science,  the 
task  before  each  is  that  defined  by  Bacon :  man  added 
to  Nature .  It  is  so  also  in  painting,  as  a  great  artist  of 
modern  time,  Cezanne,  recognised  even  in  those  same 
words:  “He  who  wishes  to  make  art,”  he  once  said  to 
Vollard,  “must  follow  Bacon,  who  defined  the  artist  as 
4  Homo  additus  Naturae.’  ”  So  it  is  that  the  artist,  if  he 
has  succeeded  in  being  true  to  his  function,  is  neces¬ 
sarily  one  who  makes  all  things  new.1  That  remarkable 
artist  who  wrote  the  Book  of  the  Revelation  has  ex¬ 
pressed  this  in  his  allegorical,  perhaps  unconscious, 
Oriental  way,  for  he  represents  the  artist  as  hearing 
the  divine  spirit  from  the  throne  within  him  utter¬ 
ing  the  command:  44 Behold,  I  make  all  things  new. 
Write!”  The  command  is  similar  whatever  the  art 
may  be,  though  it  is  here  the  privilege  of  the  writer 
to  find  his  own  art  set  forth  as  the  inspired  ensample 
of  all  art. 

Thus  it  is  that  to  write  is  a  strenuous  intellectual 
task  not  to  be  achieved  without  the  exercise  of  the  best 

not  it  is  his  own.  There  is,  however,  a  third  class  of  those  who  cannot  re¬ 
sist  the  temptation  of  deliberately  putting  forth  the  painfully  achieved 
thought  or  knowledge  of  others  as  their  own,  sometimes,  perhaps,  seek¬ 
ing  to  gloss  over  the  lapse  with:  “As  every  one  knows  —  ” 

1  Croce,  who  is  no  doubt  the  most  instructive  literary  critic  of  our 
time,  has,  in  his  own  way,  insisted  on  this  essential  fact.  As  he  would 
put  it,  there  are  no  objective  standards  of  judgment;  we  cannot  ap¬ 
proach  a  work  of  art  with  our  laws  and  categories.  We  have  to  com¬ 
prehend  the  artist’s  own  values,  and  only  then  are  we  fit  to  pronounce 
any  judgment  on  his  work.  The  task  of  the  literary  critic  is  thus  im¬ 
mensely  more  difficult  than  it  is  vulgarly  supposed  to  be.  The  same 
holds  good,  I  would  add,  of  criticism  in  the  fields  of  art,  not  excluding 
the  art  of  love  and  the  arts  of  living  in  general. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


154 

trained  and  most  deliberate  rational  faculties.  That  is 
the  outcome  of  the  whole  argument  up  to  this  point. 
There  is  so  much  bad  writing  in  the  world  because 
writing  has  been  dominated  by  ignorance  and  habit 
and  prudery,  and  not  least  by  the  academic  teachers 
and  critics  who  have  known  nothing  of  what  they 
daim  to  teach  and  were  often  themselves  singular 
examples  of  how  not  to  write.  There  has,  on  the  other 
hand,  been  a  little  good  writing  here  and  there  in  the 
world,  through  the  ages,  because  a  few  possessed  not 
only  courage  and  passion  and  patience,  but  knowledge 
and  the  concentrated  intellectual  attention,  and  the 
resolution  to  seek  truth,  and  the  conviction  that,  as 
they  imagined,  the  genius  they  sought  consisted  in 
taking  pains. 

Yet,  if  that  were  all,  many  people  would  become 
great  writers  who,  as  we  well  know,  will  never  become 
writers;  if  that  were  all,  writing  could  scarcely  even  be 
regarded  as  an  art.  For  art,  or  one  side  of  it,  transcends 
conscious  knowledge;  a  poet,  as  Landor  remarked,  “is 
not  aware  of  all  that  he  knows,  and  seems  at  last  to 
know  as  little  about  it  as  a  silkworm  knows  about  the 
fineness  of  her  thread.”  Yet  the  same  great  writer  has 
also  said  of  good  poetry,  and  with  equal  truth,  that 
“the  ignorant  and  inexpert  lose  half  its  pleasures.” 
We  always  move  on  two  feet,  as  filie  Faure  remarks  in 
his  “L’Arbre  d’Eden,”  the  two  poles  of  knowledge  and 
of  desire,  the  one  a  matter  of  deliberate  acquirement 
and  the  other  of  profound  instinct,  and  all  our  move- 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


155 


merits  are  a  perpetual  leap  from  one  to  the  other,  seek¬ 
ing  a  centre  of  gravity  we  never  attain.1  So  the  achieve¬ 
ment  of  style  in  writing,  as  in  all  human  intercourse,  is 
something  more  than  an  infinite  capacity  for  taking 
pains.  It  is  also  defined  —  and,  sometimes  I  think, 
supremely  well  defined  —  as  “grace  seasoned  with 
salt.”  Beyond  all  that  can  be  achieved  by  knowledge 
and  effort,  there  must  be  the  spontaneous  grace  that 
springs  up  like  a  fountain  from  the  depth  of  a  beauti¬ 
fully  harmonious  nature,  and  there  must  be  also  the 
quality  which  the  Spaniards  call  “sal,”  and  so  rightly 
admire  in  the  speech  of  the  women  of  the  people  of 
their  own  land,  the  salt  quality  which  gives  savour  and 
point  and  antiseptic  virtue.2 

The  best  literary  prose  speech  is  simply  the  idealisa¬ 
tion  in  the  heaven  of  art  of  the  finest  common  speech 
of  earth,  simply,  yet  never  reached  for  more  than  a 
moment  in  a  nation’s  long  history.  In  Greece  it  was 
immortally  and  radiantly  achieved  by  Plato;  in  Eng¬ 
land  it  was  attained  for  a  few  years  during  the  last 
years  of  the  seventeenth  and  the  first  years  of  the 

1  “This  search  is  the  art  of  all  great  thinkers,  of  all  great  artists,  indeed 
of  all  those  who,  even  without  attaining  expression,  desire  to  live  deeply. 
If  the  dance  brings  us  so  near  to  God,  it  is,  I  believe,  because  it  symbol¬ 
izes  for  us  the  movement  of  this  gesture.”  (£lie  Faure,  L’Arbre  d'lldent 
P-  3i8.) 

2  This  is  that  “divine  malice”  which  Nietzsche,  in  Ecce  Homo,  speak¬ 
ing  of  Heine  (“  one  day  Heine  and  I  will  be  regarded  as  by  far  the  great¬ 
est  artists  of  the  German  language,”  he  says  rather  egotistically,  but  per¬ 
haps  truly)  considered  essential  to  perfection.  “I  estimate  the  value  of 
men  and  of  races,”  he  added,  “by  their  need  to  identify  their  God  with  a 
satyr,”  a  hard  saying,  no  doubt,  to  the  modern  man,  but  it  has  its  mean- 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


156 

eighteenth  centuries,  lingering  on,  indeed,  here  and 
there  to  the  end  of  that  century  until  crushed  between 
the  pedantry  of  Johnson  and  the  poetic  licence  of  the 
Romantics.  But  for  the  rest  only  the  most  happily 
endowed  genius  can  even  attain  for  a  rare  moment  the 
perfection  of  the  Pauline  ideal  of  “grace  seasoned  with 
salt.” 

It  is  fortunate,  no  doubt,  that  an  age  of  machinery 
is  well  content  with  machine-made  writing.  It  would 
be  in  bad  taste  —  too  physiological,  too  sentimental, 
altogether  too  antiquated  —  to  refer  to  the  symbolical 
significance  of  the  highly  relevant  fact  that  the  heart, 
while  undoubtedly  a  machine,  is  at  the  same  time  a  sen¬ 
sitively  pulsating  organ  with  fleshy  strings  stretched 
from  ventricle  to  valves,  a  harp  on  which  the  great 
artist  may  play  until  our  hearts  also  throb  in  unison. 
Yet  there  are  some  to  whom  it  still  seems  that,  beyond 
mechanical  skill,  the  cadences  of  the  artist's  speech  are 
the  cadences  of  his  heart,  and  the  footfalls  of  his 
rhythm  the  footfalls  of  his  spirit,  in  a  great  adventure 
across  the  universe. 


n 

Thus  we  do  not  always  realise  that  learning  to  write  is 
partly  a  matter  of  individual  instinct.  This  is  so  even 
of  that  writing  which,  as  children,  we  learnt  in  copy¬ 
books  with  engraved  maxims  at  the  head  of  the  page. 
There  are  some,  indeed,  probably  the  majority,  who 
quickly  achieve  the  ability  to  present  a  passable  iroita- 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


157 

don  of  the  irreproachable  model  presented  to  them 
There  are  some  who  cannot.  I  speak  as  one  who  knows, 
for  I  recall  how  my  first  schoolmaster,  a  sarcastic  little 
Frenchman,  irritated  by  my  unchastenable  hand, 
would  sometimes  demand  if  I  wrote  with  the  kitchen 
poker,  or  again  assert  that  I  kept  a  tame  spider  to  run 
over  the  page,  while  a  later  teacher,  who  was  an 
individualist  and  more  tolerant,  yet  sometimes  felt 
called  upon  to  murmur,  in  a  tone  of  dubious  optimism: 
“  You  will  have  a  hand  of  your  own,  my  boy.”  It  is  not 
lack  of  docility  that  is  in  question,  but  an  imperative 
demand  of  the  nervous  system  which  the  efforts  of  the 
will  may  indeed  bend  but  cannot  crush. 

Yet  the  writers  who  cheerfully  lay  down  the  laws  of 
style  seldom  realise  this  complexity  and  mystery  en¬ 
wrapping  even  so  simple  a  matter  as  handwriting.  No 
one  can  say  how  much  atavistic  recurrence  from 
remote  ancestors,  how  much  family  nervous  habit, 
how  much  wayward  yet  deep-rooted  personal  idiosyn¬ 
crasy  deflect  the  child’s  patient  efforts  to  imitate  the 
copperplate  model  which  is  set  before  him.  The  son 
often  writes  like  the  father,  even  though  he  may  seldom 
or  never  see  his  father’s  handwriting;  brothers  may 
write  singularly  alike,  though  taught  by  different 
teachers  and  even  in  different  continents.  It  has  been 
noted  of  the  ancient  and  distinguished  family  of  the 
Tyrrells  that  their  handwriting  in  the  parish  books  of 
Stowmarket  remained  the  same  throughout  many 
generations.  I  have  noticed,  in  a  relation  of  my  own, 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


158 

peculiarities  of  handwriting  identical  with  those  of  an 
ancestor  two  centuries  ago  whose  writing  he  certainly 
never  saw.  The  resemblance  is  often  not  that  of 
exact  formation,  but  of  general  air  or  underlying 
structure.1  One  is  tempted  to  think  that  often,  in  this 
as  in  other  matters,  the  possibilities  are  limited,  and 
that  when  the  child  is  formed  in  his  mother’s  womb 
Nature  cast  the  same  old  dice  and  the  same  old  com¬ 
binations  inevitably  tend  to  recur.  But  that  notion 
scarcely  fits  all  the  facts,  and  our  growing  knowledge 
of  the  infinite  subtlety  of  heredity,  of  its  presence 
even  in  the  most  seemingly  elusive  psychic  characters, 
indicates  that  the  dice  may  be  loaded  and  fall  in  accord 
with  harmonies  we  fail  to  perceive.  The  development 
of  Mendelian  analysis  may  in  time  help  us  to  under¬ 
stand  them. 

The  part  in  style  which  belongs  to  atavism,  to 
heredity,  to  unconscious  instinct,  is  probably  very 
large.  It  eludes  us  to  an  even  greater  extent  than  the 
corresponding  part  in  handwriting  because  the  man  of 
letters  may  have  none  among  his  ancestors  who  sought 
expression  in  style,  so  that  only  one  Milton  speaks  for 
a  mute  inglorious  family,  and  how  far  he  speaks  truly 
remains  a  matter  of  doubt.  We  only  divine  the  truth 
when  we  know  the  character  and  deeds  of  the  family. 
There  could  be  no  more  instructive  revelation  of 

1  Since  this  was  written  I  have  found  that  Laycock,  whose  subtle  ob¬ 
servation  pioneered  so  many  later  ideas,  long  ago  noted  (“Some  Organic 
Laws  of  Memory,”  Journal  of  Mental  Science ,  July,  1875)  reversion  to 
ancestral  modes  of  handwriting. 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


159 


family  history  in  style  than  is  furnished  by  Carlyle. 
There  had  never  been  any  writer  in  the  Carlyle  family, 
and  if  there  had,  Carlyle  at  the  time  when  his  manner 
of  writing  was  formed,  would  scarcely  have  sought  to 
imitate  them.  Yet  we  could  not  conceive  this  stem, 
laborious,  plebeian  family  of  Lowland  Scots  —  with 
its  remote  Teutonic  affinities,  its  coarseness,  its  nar¬ 
rowness,  its  assertive  inarticulative  force  —  in  any 
more  fitting  verbal  translation  than  was  given  it  by 
this  its  last  son,  the  pathetic  little  figure  with  the  face 
of  a  lost  child,  who  wrote  in  a  padded  room  and  turned 
the  rough  muscular  and  reproductive  activity  of  his 
fathers  into  more  than  half  a  century  of  eloquent 
chatter  concerning  Work  and  Silence,  so  writing  his 
name  in  letters  of  gold  on  the  dome  of  the  British 
Museum.1 

1  This  was  written  fifteen  years  ago,  and  as  Carlyle  has  of  late  been 
unduly  depreciated  I  would  add  that,  while  strictly  to  the  present  point, 
it  is  not  put  forward  as  an  estimate  of  Carlyle’s  genius.  That  I  seem  to 
have  attempted  twenty-five  years  earlier  in  a  private  letter  (to  my  friend 
the  late  Reverend  Angus  Mackay)  I  may  here  perhaps  be  allowed  to 
quote.  It  was  in  1883,  soon  after  the  publication  of  Carlyle’s  Reminis¬ 
cences:  “This  is  not  Carlylese,  but  it  is  finer.  The  popular  judgment  is 
hopelessly  wrong.  We  can  never  understand  Carlyle  till  we  get  rid  of  the 
‘great  prophet’  notion.  Carlyle  is  not  (as  we  were  once  taught)  a  ‘great 
moral  teacher,’  but,  in  the  high  sense,  a  great  comedian.  His  books  are 
wonderful  comedies.  He  is  the  Scotch  Aristophanes,  as  Rabelais  is  the 
French  and  Heine  the  German  Aristophanes  —  of  course,  with  the  in¬ 
tense  northern  imagination,  more  clumsy,  more  imperfect,  more  pro¬ 
found  than  the  Greek.  But,  at  a  long  distance,  there  is  a  close  resem¬ 
blance  to  Aristophanes  with  the  same  mixture  of  audacity  in  method 
and  conservatism  in  spirit.  Cariyle’s  account  of  Lamb  seems  in  the  true 
sense  Aristophanic.  His  humour  is,  too,  as  broad  as  he  dares  (some 
curious  resemblances  there,  too).  In  his  lyrical  outbursts,  again,  he. 
follows  Aristophanes,  and  again  at  a  distance.  Of  course  he  cannot  be 


x6o  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

When  we  consider  the  characteristics*  not  of  the 
family,  but  of  the  race,  it  is  easier  to  find  examples  of 
the  force  of  ancestry,  even  remote  ancestry,  overcom¬ 
ing  environment  and  dominating  style.  Shakespeare 
and  Bacon  were  both  Elizabethans  who  both  lived 
from  youth  upwards  in  London,  and  even  moved  to 
some  extent  almost  in  the  same  circles.  Yet  all  the 
influences  of  tradition  and  environment,  which  some¬ 
times  seem  to  us  so  strong,  scarcely  sufficed  to  spread 
even  the  faintest  veneer  of  similarity  over  their  style, 
and  we  could  seldom  mistake  a  sentence  of  one  for  a 
sentence  of  the  other.  We  always  know  that  Shake¬ 
speare  —  with  his  gay  extravagance  and  redundancy, 
his  essential  idealism  —  came  of  a  people  that  had 
been  changed  in  character  from  the  surrounding  stock 
by  a  Celtic  infolding  of  the  receding  British  to  Wales.1 
We  never  fail  to  realise  that  Bacon  —  with  his  in¬ 
stinctive  gravity  and  temperance,  the  suppressed 
ardour  of  his  aspiring  intellectual  passion,  his  tempera¬ 
mental  naturalism  —  was  rooted  deep  in  that  East 
Anglian  soil  which  he  had  never  so  much  as  visited. 
In  Shakespeare’s  veins  there  dances  the  blood  of  the 
men  who  made  the  “  Mabinogion” ;  we  recognise 
Bacon  as  a  man  of  the  same  countryside  which  pro- 

compared  as  an  artist.  He  has  not,  like  Rabelais,  created  a  world  to 
play  with,  but,  like  Aristophanes  generally,  he  sports  with  the  things 
that  are.”  That  youthful  estimate  was  alien  to  popular  opinion  then  be¬ 
cause  Carlyle  was  idolised;  it  is  now,  no  doubt,  equally  alien  for  an  oppo¬ 
site  reason.  It  is  only  on  extremes  that  the  indolent  popular  mind  can 
rest. 

1  J.  Beddoe,  The  Races  of  Britain ,  p.  254. 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


t6i 


duced  the  forefathers  of  Emerson.  Or  we  may  consider 
the  mingled  Breton  and  Gascon  ancestry  of  Renan,  in 
whose  brain,  in  the  very  contour  and  melody  of  his 
style,  the  ancient  bards  of  Brittany  have  joined  hands 
with  the  tribe  of  Montaigne  and  Bran  tome  and  the 
rest.  Or,  to  take  one  more  example,  we  can  scarcely 
fail  to  recognise  in  the  style  of  Sir  Thomas  Browne  — 
as  later,  may  be,  in  that  of  Hawthorne  —  the  glamour 
of  which  the  latent  aptitude  had  been  handed  on  by 
ancestors  who  dwelt  on  the  borders  of  Wales. 

In  these  examples  hereditary  influence  can  be  clearly 
distinguished  from  merely  external  and  traditional 
influences.  Not  that  we  need  imply  a  disparagement 
of  tradition:  it  is  the  foundation  of  civilised  progress. 
Speech  itself  is  a  tradition,  a  naturally  developed  con¬ 
vention,  and  in  that  indeed  it  has  its  universal  ap¬ 
plicability  and  use.  It  is  the  crude  amorphous  material 
of  art,  of  music  and  poetry.  But  on  its  formal  side, 
whatever  its  supreme  significance  as  the  instrument 
and  medium  of  expression,  speech  is  a  natural  conven¬ 
tion,  an  accumulated  tradition. 

Even  tradition,  however,  is  often  simply  the  cor¬ 
poreal  embodiment,  as  it  were,  of  heredity.  Behind 
many  a  great  writer’s  personality  there  stands  tradi¬ 
tion,  and  behind  tradition  the  race.  That  is  well 
illustrated  in  the  style  of  Addison.  This  style  —  with 
a  resilient  fibre  underneath  its  delicacy  and  yet  a 
certain  freedom  as  of  conversational  familiarity  —  has 
as  its  most  easily  marked  structural  signature  a  tend- 


162 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


ency  to  a  usage  it  has  already  been  necessary  to  men¬ 
tion  :  the  tendency  to  allow  the  preposition  to  lag  to  the 
end  of  the  sentence  rather  than  to  come  tautly  before 
the  pronoun  with  which  in  Latin  it  is  combined.  In  a 
century  in  which  the  Latin-French  elements  of  English 
were  to  become  developed,  as  in  Gibbon  and  Johnson, 
to  the  utmost,  the  totally  different  physiognomy  of 
Addison’s  prose  remained  conspicuous,  —  though  really 
far  from  novel,  —  and  to  the  sciolists  of  a  bygone 
age  it  seemed  marked  by  carelessness,  if  not  licence,  at 
the  best  by  personal  idiosyncrasy.  Yet,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  we  know  it  was  nothing  of  the  kind.  Addison,  as 
his  name  indicates,  was  of  the  stock  of  the  Scandina¬ 
vian  English,  and  the  Cumberland  district  he  belonged 
to  is  largely  Scandinavian;  the  adjoining  peninsula  of 
Furness,  which  swarms  with  similar  patronymics,  is 
indeed  one  of  the  most  purely  Scandinavian  spots  in 
England.  Now  in  the  Scandinavian  languages,  as  we 
know,  and  in  the  English  dialects  based  upon  them, 
the  preposition  comes  usually  at  the  end  of  the  sen¬ 
tence,  and  Scandinavian  structural  elements  form  an 
integral  part  of  English,  even  more  than  Latin 
French,  for  it  has  been  the  part  of  the  latter  rather  to 
enrich  the  vocabulary  than  to  mould  the  structure  of 
our  tongue.  So  that,  instead  of  introducing  a  personal 
idiosyncrasy  or  perpetrating  a  questionable  licence, 
Addison  was  continuing  his  own  ancestral  traditions 
and  at  the  same  time  asserting  an  organic  prerogative 
of  English  speech.  It  may  be  added  that  Addison 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING  163 

reveals  his  Scandinavian  affinities  not  merely  in  the 
material  structure,  but  in  the  spiritual  quality,  of  his 
work.  This  delicate  sympathetic  observation,  the  vein 
of  gentle  melancholy,  the  quiet  restrained  humour,  meet 
us  again  in  modern  Norwegian  authors  like  Jonas  Lie. 

When  we  put  aside  these  ancestral  and  traditional 
influences,  there  is  still  much  in  the  writer’s  art  which, 
even  if  personal,  we  can  only  term  instinctive.  This 
may  be  said  of  that  music  which  at  their  finest  mo¬ 
ments  belongs  to  all  the  great  writers  of  prose.  Every 
writer  has  his  own  music,  though  there  are  few  in 
whom  it  becomes  audible  save  at  rare  and  precious 
intervals.  The  prose  of  the  writer  who  can  deliberately 
make  his  own  personal  cadences  monotonously  audible 
all  the  time  grows  wearisome ;  it  affects  us  as  a  tedious 
mannerism.  This  is  a  kind  of  machine-made  prose 
which  indeed  it  requires  a  clever  artisan  to  produce; 
but,  as  Landor  said,  “he  must  be  a  bad  writer  to  whom 
there  are  no  inequalities.”  The  great  writers,  though 
they  are  always  themselves,  attain  the  perfect  music 
of  their  style  under  the  stress  of  a  stimulus  adequate 
to  arouse  it.  Their  music  is  the  audible  translation  of 
emotion,  and  only  arises  when  the  waves  of  emotion 
are  stirred.  It  is  not  properly  speaking  a  voluntary 
effect.  We  can  but  say  that  the  winds  of  the  spirit  are 
breathed  upon  the  surface  of  style,  and  they  lift  it  into 
rhythmic  movement.  And  for  each  writer  these  waves 
have  their  own  special  rate  of  vibration,  their  peculiar 
shape  and  interval.  The  rich  deep  slow  tones  of  Bacon 


564  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

have  nothing  in  common  with  the  haunting,  long- 
drawn  melody,  faint  and  tremulous,  of  Newman;  the 
high  metallic  falsetto  ring  of  De  Quincey’s  rhetoric  is 
far  away  from  the  pensive  low-toned  music  of  Pater. 

Imitation,  as  psychologists  have  taught  us  to  realise, 
is  a  part  of  instinct.  When  we  begin  to  learn  to  write, 
it  rarely  happens  that  we  are  not  imitators,  and,  for 
the  most  part,  unconsciously.  The  verse  of  every 
young  poet,  however  original  he  may  afterwards  grow, 
usually  has  plainly  written  across  it  the  rhythmic 
signature  of  some  great  master  whose  work  chances  to 
be  abroad  in  the  world ;  once  it  was  usually  Tennyson, 
then  Swinburne,  now  various  later  poets;  the  same 
thing  happens  with  prose,  but  the  rhythm  of  the 
signature  is  less  easy  to  hear. 

As  a  writer  slowly  finds  his  own  centre  of  gravity, 
the  influence  of  the  rhythm  of  other  writers  ceases  to  be 
perceptible  except  in  so  far  as  it  coincides  with  his  own 
natural  movement  and  tempo.  That  is  a  familiar  fact. 
We  less  easily  realise,  perhaps,  that  not  only  the  tunes 
but  the  notes  that  they  are  formed  of  are,  in  every 
great  writer,  his  own.  In  other  words,  he  creates  even 
his  vocabulary.  That  is  so  not  only  in  the  more  obvious 
sense  that  out  of  the  mass  of  words  that  make  up  a 
language  every  writer  uses  only  a  limited  number  and 
even  among  these  has  his  words  of  predilection.1  It  is 

1  I  once  studied,  as  an  example,  colour-words  in  various  writers,  find¬ 
ing  that  every  poet  has  his  own  colour  formula.  Variations  in  length  oi 
sentence  and  peculiarities  of  usage  in  metre  have  often  been  studied. 
Reference  is  made  to  some  of  these  studies  by  A.  Niceforo,  “Metodo 
Statistics  e  Document}  Liu  era ri,”  Revista  d'ltalia ,  August,  1917. 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING  165 

in  the  meanings  he  gives  to  words,  to  names,  that  a 
writer  creates  his  vocabulary.  All  language,  we  know, 
is  imagery  and  metaphor;  even  the  simplest  names 
of  the  elementary  things  are  metaphors  based  on  re¬ 
semblances  that  suggested  themselves  to  the  primitive 
men  who  made  language.  It  is  not  otherwise  with  the 
aboriginal  man  of  genius  who  uses  language  to  express 
his  new  vision  of  the  world.  He  sees  things  charged 
with  energy,  or  brilliant  with  colour,  or  breathing  out 
perfume,  that  the  writers  who  came  before  him  had 
overlooked,  and  to  designate  these  things  he  must  use 
names  which  convey  the  qualities  he  lias  perceived. 
Guided  by  his  own  new  personal  sensations  and  per¬ 
ceptions,  he  creates  his  metaphorical  vocabulary.  If 
we  examine  the  style  of  Montaigne,  so  fresh  and 
personal  and  inventive,  we  see  that  its  originality  lies 
largely  in  its  vocabulary,  which  is  not,  like  that  of 
Rabelais,  manufactured  afresh,  but  has  its  novelty  in 
its  metaphorical  values,  such  new  values  being  tried 
and  tempered  at  every  step,  to  the  measure  of  the 
highly  individual  person  behind  them,  who  thereby 
exerts  his  creative  force.  In  later  days  Huysmans,  who 
indeed  saw  the  world  at  a  more  eccentric  angle  than 
Montaigne,  yet  with  unflinching  veracity  and  absolute 
devotion,  set  himself  to  the  task  of  creating  his  own 
vocabulary,  and  at  first  the  unfamiliarity  of  its  beauty 
estranges  us. 

To  think  of  Huysmans  is  to  be  led  towards  an  aspect 
of  style  not  to  be  passed  over.  To  say  that  the  artist 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


1 66 

in  words  is  expressing  a  new  vision  of  the  world  and 
seeking  the  designations  for  things  as  he  sees  them,  is  a 
large  part  of  the  truth,  and,  I  would  say,  perhaps  the 
most  important  part  of  it.  For  most  of  us,  I  suppose 
(as  I  know  it  has  been  for  me),  our  vision  of  Nature  has 
been  largely,  though  by  no  means  entirely,  constituted 
by  pictures  we  have  seen,  by  poems  we  have  read,  that 
left  an  abiding  memory.  That  is  to  say  that  Nature 
comes  to  us  through  an  atmosphere  which  is  the 
emanation  of  supreme  artists  who  once  thrilled  us. 
But  we  are  here  concerned  with  the  process  of  the 
artist’s  work  and  not  with  his  aesthetic  influence.  The 
artist  finds  that  words  have  a  rich  content  of  their 
own,  they  are  alive  and  they  flourish  or  decay.  They 
send  out  connecting  threads  in  every  direction,  they 
throb  with  meaning  that  ever  changes  and  reverber¬ 
ates  afar.  The  writer  is  not  always,  or  often,  merely 
preparing  a  catalogue  raisonne  of  things,  he  is  an  artibt 
and  his  pigments  are  words.  Often  he  merely  takes  his 
suggestions  from  the  things  of  the  world  and  makes  his 
own  pictures  without  any  real  resemblance  to  the 
scene  it  is  supposed  to  depict.  Dujardin  tells  us  that  he 
once  took  Huysmans  to  a  Wagner  concert;  he  scarcely 
listened  to  the  music,  but  he  was  fascinated  by  the 
programme  the  attendant  handed  to  him;  he  went 
home  to  write  a  brilliant  page  on  “Tannhauser.” 
Mallarm6,  on  the  other  hand,  was  soaked  in  music;  to 
him  music  was  the  voice  of  the  world,  and  it  was  the 
aim  of  poetry  to  express  the  world  by  itself  becoming 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING  167 

music;  he  stood  on  a  height  like  a  pioneer  and  looked 
towards  the  Promised  Land,  trying  to  catch  intima¬ 
tions  of  a  new  sensibility  and  a  future  art,  but  a  great 
master  of  language,  like  Huysmans,  he  never  was. 
Huysmans  has  written  superb  pages  about  Gustave 
Moreau  and  Felicien  Rops,  thinking,  no  doubt,  that 
he  was  revealing  supreme  artists  (though  we  need  not 
follow  too  closely  the  fashion  of  depreciating  either  of 
those  artists),  but  he  was  really  only  attracted  to  their 
programmes  and  therein  experiencing  a  stimulus  that 
chanced  to  be  peculiarly  fitted  for  drawing  out  his 
own  special  art.  Baudelaire  would  have  written  less 
gorgeously,  but  he  would  have  produced  a  more  final 
critical  estimate. 

Yet  even  the  greatest  writers  are  affected  by  the 
intoxication  of  mere  words  in  the  artistry  of  language. 
Shakespeare  is,  constantly,  and,  not  content  with 
* ‘  making  the  green  one  red,”  he  must  needs  at  the  same 
time  “the  multitudinous  seas  incarnadine.”  It  is  con¬ 
spicuous  in  Keats  (as  Leigh  Hunt,  perhaps  his  first 
sensitively  acute  critic,  clearly  explained),  and  often, 
as  in  “The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes,”  where  he  seemed  to  be 
concerned  with  beautiful  things,  he  was  really  con¬ 
cerned  with  beautiful  words.  In  that  way  he  is  some¬ 
times  rather  misleading  for  the  too  youthful  reader; 
“porphyry”  seemed  to  me  a  marvellous  substance 
when  as  a  boy  of  twelve  I  read  of  it  in  Keats,  and  I 
imagine  that  Keats  himself  would  have  been  surprised, 
had  he  lived  long  enough  to  walk  to  St.  Thomas’s 


168 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


Hospital  over  the  new  London  Bridge,  when  told  that 
he  was  treading  a  granite  that  was  porphyritic.  I 
recall  how  Verlaine  would  sometimes  repeat  in  varying 
tones  some  rather  unfamiliar  word,  rolling  it  round  and 
round  in  his  mouth,  sucking  it  like  a  sweetmeat,  licking 
the  sound  into  the  shape  that  pleased  him;  some 
people  may  perhaps  have  found  a  little  bizarre  the 
single  words  (“Green,”  for  example)  which  he  some¬ 
times  made  the  title  of  a  song,  but  if  they  adopt  the 
preliminary  Verlainian  process  they  may  understand 
how  he  had  fitted  such  words  to  music  and  meaning. 

The  most  obviously  beautiful  things  in  the  world  of 
Nature  are  birds  and  flowers  and  the  stones  we  call 
precious.  But  the  attitude  of  the  poet  in  the  presence 
of  Nature  is  precisely  that  of  Huysmans  in  the  presence 
of  art :  it  is  the  programme  that  interests  him.  Of  birds 
the  knowledge  of  poets  generally  is  of  the  most  gener¬ 
alised  and  elementary  kind;  they  are  the  laughing¬ 
stock  of  the  ornithologist;  they  are  only  a  stage  re¬ 
moved  from  the  standpoint  of  the  painter  who  was 
introducing  a  tree  into  his  landscape  and  when  asked 
what  tree,  replied,  “Oh,  just  the  ordinary  tree.”  Even 
Goethe  mistook  the  finches  by  the  roadside  for  larks. 
The  poet,  one  may  be  sure,  even  to-day  seldom  carries 
in  his  pocket  the  little  “Fiihrer  durch  unsere  Vogel- 
welt”  of  Bernhard  Hoffmann,  and  has  probably  never 
so  much  as  heard  of  it.  Of  flowers  his  knowledge  seems 
to  be  limited  by  the  quality  of  the  flower’s  name.  I 
have  long  cherished  an  exquisite  and  quite  common 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING  i6g 

English  wild-flower,  but  have  never  come  across  a 
poem  about  it,  for  its  unattractive  name  is  the  stitch- 
wort,  and  it  is  only  lately  that  even  in  prose  it  has  met 
(from  Mr.  Salt)  writh  due  appreciation.  As  regards 
precious  stones  the  same  may  be  said,  and  in  the 
galleries  of  the  Geological  Museum  it  has  hardly 
seemed  to  me  that,  among  the  few  visitors,  there  were 
poets  (unless  I  chanced  to  bring  one  myself)  to  brood 
over  all  that  beauty.  It  is  the  word  and  its  inner 
reverberation  with  which  the  poet  is  really  concerned, 
even  sometimes  perhaps  deliberately.  When  Milton 
misused  the  wx>rd  “eglantine”  one  realises  the  uncon¬ 
scious  appeal  to  him  of  the  name  and  one  cannot  feel 
quite  sure  that  it  wras  altogether  unconscious.  Cole¬ 
ridge  has  been  solemnly  reproved  for  speaking  of  the 
“loud ”  bassoon.  But  it  was  to  the  timbre  of  the  word, 
not  of  the  instrument,  that  Coleridge  was  responding, 
and  had  he  been  informed  that  the  bassoon  is  not  loud, 
I  doubt  not  he  would  have  replied:  “Well,  if  it  is  not 
loud  it  ought  to  be.”  On  the  plane  on  which  Coleridge 
moved  “the  loud  bassoon”  wras  absolutely  right.  We 
see  that  the  artist  in  speech  moves  among  words  rather 
than  among  things.  Originally,  it  is  true,  wwds  arc 
closely  related  to  things,  but  in  their  far  reverberation 
they  have  become  enriched  by  many  associations, 
saturated  with  many  colours;  they  have  acquired  a  life 
of  their  own,  moving  on  another  plane  than  that  of 
things,  and  it  is  on  that  plane  that  the  artist  in  words 
is,  as  an  artist,  concerned  with  them. 


170 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


It  thus  comes  about  that  the  artist  in  words,  like  the 
artist  in  pigments,  is  perpetually  passing  between  two 
planes  —  the  plane  of  new  vision  and  the  plane  of  new 
creation.  He  is  sometimes  remoulding  the  external 
world  and  sometimes  the  internal  world ;  sometimes,  by 
predilection,  lingering  more  on  one  plane  than  on  the 
rther  plane.  The  artist  in  words  is  not  irresistibly 
drawn  to  the  exact  study  of  things  or  moved  by  the 
strong  love  of  Nature.  The  poets  who  describe  Nature 
most  minutely  and  most  faithfully  are  not  usually  the 
great  poets.  That  is  intelligible  because  the  poet  — 
even  the  poet  in  the  wide  sense  who  also  uses  prose  — 
is  primarily  the  instrument  of  human  emotion  and  not 
of  scientific  observation.  Yet  that  poet  possesses  im¬ 
mense  resources  of  strength  who  in  early  life  has 
stored  within  him  the  minute  knowledge  of  some  field 
of  the  actual  external  world.1  One  may  doubt,  indeed, 
whether  there  has  been  any  supreme  poet,  from  Homer 
on,  who  has  not  had  this  inner  reservoir  of  sensitive 
impressions  to  draw  from.  The  youthful  Shakespeare 
who  wrote  the  poems,  with  their  minute  descriptions, 
was  not  a  great  poet,  as  the  youthful  Marlowe  was, 
but  he  was  storing  up  the  material  which,  when  he  had 

1  “The  Muses  are  the  daughters  of  Memory,”  Paul  Morand  tells  ua 
that  Proust  would  say;  “there  is  no  art  without  recollection,”  and  cer¬ 
tainly  it  is  supremely  true  of  Proust’s  art.  It  is  that  element  of  art  which 
imparts  at  once  both  atmosphere  and  poignant  intimacy,  external  far¬ 
ness  with  internal  nearness.  The  lyrics  of  Thomas  Hardy  owe  their 
intimacy  of  appeal  to  the  dominance  in  them  of  recollection  (in  Late 
Lyrics  and  Earlier  one  might  say  it  is  never  absent),  and  that  is  why 
they  can  scarcely  be  fully  appreciated  save  by  those  who  are  no  longej 
very  young. 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


171 

developed  into  a  great  poet,  he  could  draw  on  at  need 
with  a  careless  and  assured  hand.  Without  such  reser¬ 
voirs,  the  novelists  also  would  never  attain  to  that 
touch  of  the  poet  which,  beyond  their  story-telling 
power,  can  stir  our  hearts.  “A  la  Recherche  du  Temps 
Perdu”  is  the  name  of  a  great  modern  book,  but  every 
novelist  during  part  of  his  time  has  been  a  Ulysses  on  a 
perilous  voyage  of  adventure  for  that  far  home.  One 
thinks  of  George  Eliot  and  her  early  intimacy  with  the 
life  of  country  people,  of  Hardy  who  had  acquired  so 
acute  a  sensitivity  to  the  sounds  of  Nature,  of  Conrad 
who  had  caught  the  flashes  of  penetrating  vision  which 
came  to  the  sailor  on  deck ;  and  in  so  far  as  they  move 
away  into  scenes  where  they  cannot  draw  from  those 
ancient  reservoirs,  the  adventures  of  these  artists, 
however  brilliant  they  may  become,  lose  their  power  of 
intimate  appeal.  The  most  extravagant  example  of 
this  to-day  is  the  Spanish  novelist  Blasco  Ibanez,  who 
wrote  of  the  Valencian  huerta  that  had  saturated  his 
youth  in  novels  that  were  penetrating  and  poignant, 
and  then  turned  to  writing  for  the  cosmopolitan  crowd 
novels  about  anything,  that  were  completely  negligible. 

We  grow  familiar  in  time  with  the  style  of  the  great 
writers,  and  when  we  read  them  we  translate  them 
easily  and  unconsciously,  as  we  translate  a  foreign 
language  we  are  familiar  with;  we  understand  the 
vocabulary  because  we  have  learnt  to  know  the  special 
seal  of  the  creative  person  who  moulded  the  vocabu¬ 
lary.  But  at  the  outset  the  great  writer  may  be  almost 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


172 

as  unintelligible  to  us  as  though  he  were  writing  in  a 
language  we  had  never  learnt.  In  the  now  remote 
days  when  “Leaves  of  Grass”  was  a  new  book  in  the 
world,  few  who  looked  into  it  for  the  first  time,  how¬ 
ever  honestly,  but  were  repelled  and  perhaps  even 
violently  repelled,  and  it  is  hard  to  realise  now  that 
once  those  who  fell  on  Swinburne’s  “Poems  and 
Ballads”  saw  at  first  only  picturesque  hieroglyphics  to 
which  they  had  no  key.  But  even  to-day  how  many 
there  are  who  find  Proust  unreadable  and  Joyce  un¬ 
intelligible.  Until  we  find  the  door  and  the  clue  the 
new  writer  remains  obscure.  Therein  lies  the  truth  of 
Landor’s  saying  that  the  poet  must  himself  create  the 
beings  who  are  to  enjoy  his  Paradise. 

For  most  of  those  who  deliberately  seek  to  learn  to 
write,  words  seem  generally  to  be  felt  as  of  less  impor¬ 
tance  than  the  art  of  arranging  them.  It  is  thus  that 
the  learner  in  writing  tends  to  become  the  devoted  stu¬ 
dent  of  grammar  and  syntax  whom  we  came  across  at 
the  outset.  That  is  indeed  a  tendency  which  always 
increases.  Civilisation  develops  with  a  conscious  ad^ 
hesion  to  formal  order,  and  the  writer  —  writing  by 
fashion  or  by  ambition  and  not  by  divine  right  of 
creative  instinct  —  follows  the  course  of  civilisation. 
It  is  an  unfortunate  tendency,  for  those  whom  it  af¬ 
fects  conquer  by  their  number.  As  we  know,  writing 
that  is  real  is  not  learnt  that  way.  Just  as  the  solar 
system  was  not  made  in  accordance  with  the  astrono¬ 
mer’s  laws,  so  writing  is  not  made  by  the  laws  of  gram- 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


173 


mar.  Astronomer  and  grammarian  alike  can  only  come 
in  at  the  end,  to  give  a  generalised  description  of  what 
usually  happens  in  the  respective  fields  it  pleases  them 
to  explore.  When  a  new  comet,  cosmic  or  literary, 
enters  their  sky,  it  is  their  descriptions  which  have  to 
be  readjusted,  and  not  the  comet.  There  seems  to  be 
no  more  pronounced  mark  of  the  decadence  of  a  people 
and  its  literature  than  a  servile  and  rigid  subserviency 
to  rule.  It  can  only  make  for  ossification,  for  anchy¬ 
losis,  for  petrification,  all  the  milestones  on  the  road  of 
death.  In  every  age  of  democratic  plebeianism,  where 
each  man  thinks  he  is  as  good  a  writer  as  the  others, 
and  takes  his  laws  from  the  others,  having  no  laws  of 
his  own  nature,  it  is  down  this  steep  path  that  men,  in 
a  flock,  inevitably  run. 

We  may  find  an  illustration  of  the  plebeian  anchy¬ 
losis  of  advancing  civilisation  in  the  minor  matter  of 
spelling.  We  cannot,  it  is  true,  overlook  the  fact  that 
writing  is  read  and  that  its  appearance  cannot  be  quite 
disregarded.  Yet,  ultimately,  it  appeals  to  the  ear, 
and  spelling  can  have  little  to  do  with  style.  The  laws 
of  spelling,  properly  speaking,  are  few  or  none,  and  in 
the  great  ages  men  have  understood  this  and  boldly 
acted  accordingly.  They  exercised  a  fine  personal  dis¬ 
cretion  in  the  matter  and  permitted  without  ques¬ 
tion  a  wide  range  of  variation.  Shakespeare,  as  we 
know,  even  spelt  his  own  name  in  several  different 
ways,  all  equally  correct.  When  that  great  old  Eliza¬ 
bethan  mariner,  Sir  Martin  Frobisher,  entered  on  one 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


174 

of  his  rare  and  hazardous  adventures  with  the  pen,  he 
created  spelling  absolutely  afresh,  in  the  spirit  of 
simple  heroism  with  which  he  was  always  ready  to  sail 
out  into  strange  seas.  His  epistolary  adventures  are, 
certainly,  more  interesting  than  admirable,  but  we 
have  no  reason  to  suppose  that  the  distinguished 
persons  to  whom  these  letters  were  addressed  viewed 
them  with  any  disdain.  More  anaemic  ages  cannot 
endure  creative  vitality  even  in  spelling,  and  so  it 
comes  about  that  in  periods  when  everything  beautiful 
and  handmade  gives  place  to  manufactured  articles 
made  wholesale,  uniform,  and  cheap,  the  same  prin¬ 
ciples  are  applied  to  words,  and  spelling  becomes  a 
mechanic  trade.  We  must  have  our  spelling  uniform, 
even  if  uniformly  bad.1  Just  as  the  man  who,  having 
out  of  sheer  ignorance  eaten  the  wrrong  end  of  his 
asparagus,  was  thenceforth  compelled  to  declare  that 
he  preferred  that  end,  so  it  is  with  our  race  in  the  mat¬ 
ter  of  spelling;  our  ancestors,  by  chance  or  by  igno- 

1  The  Oxford  University  Press  publishes  a  little  volume  of  Rules  for 
Compositors  and  Readers  in  which  this  uniform  is  set  forth.  It  is  a  useful 
and  interesting  manual,  but  one  wonders  how  many  unnecessary  and 
even  undesirable  usages  —  including  that  morbid  desire  to  cling  to  the 
ize  termination  (charming  as  an  eccentricity  but  hideous  as  a  rule)  when 
ise  would  suffice  —  are  hereby  fostered.  Even  when  we  leave  out  of  con¬ 
sideration  the  great  historical  tradition  of  variety  in  this  matter,  it  is 
doubtful,  when  we  consider  them  comprehensively,  whether  the  advan¬ 
tages  of  encouraging  every  one  to  spell  like  his  fellows  overbalances  the 
advantages  of  encouraging  every  one  to  spell  unlike  his  fellows.  When  1 
was  a  teacher  in  the  Australian  bush  I  derived  far  less  enjoyment  from 
the  more  or  less  '‘correctly’’  spelt  exercises  of  my  pupils  than  from  the 
occasional  notes  I  received  from  their  parents  who,  never  having  been 
taught  to  spell,  were  able  to  spell  in  the  grand  manner.  We  are  wilfully 
throwing  away  an  endless  source  of  delight. 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


*75 


ranee,  tended  to  adopt  certain  forms  of  spelling  and 
we,  their  children,  are  forced  to  declare  that  we  prefer 
those  forms.  Thus  we  have  not  only  lost  all  individual¬ 
ity  in  spelling,  but  we  pride  ourselves  on  our  loss 
and  magnify  our  anchylosis.  In  England  it  has  be¬ 
come  almost  impossible  to  flex  our  stiffened  mental 
joints  sufficiently  to  press  out  a  single  letter,  in 
America  it  is  almost  impossible  to  extend  them  enough 
to  admit  that  letter.  It  is  convenient,  we  say,  to  be 
rigid  and  formal  in  these  things,  and  therewith  we  are 
content;  it  matters  little  to  us  that  we  have  thereby 
killed  the  life  of  our  words  and  only  gained  the  con- 
veniency  of  death.  It  would  be  likewise  convenient, 
no  doubt,  if  men  and  women  could  be  turned  into 
rigid  geometrical  diagrams,  —  as  indeed  our  legislators 
sometimes  seem  to  think  that  they  already  are,  —  but 
we  should  pay  by  yielding  up  all  the  infinite  variations, 
the  beautiful  sinuosities,  that  had  once  made  up  life. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  in  the  much  greater 
matter  of  style  we  have  paid  heavily  for  the  attainment 
of  our  slavish  adherence  to  mechanical  rules,  however 
convenient,  however  inevitable.  The  beautiful  incor¬ 
rection,  as  we  are  now  compelled  to  regard  it,  that  so 
often  marked  the  great  and  even  the  small  writers  of 
the  seventeenth  century,  has  been  lost,  for  all  can  now 
write  what  any  find  it  easy  to  read,  what  none  have  any 
consuming  desire  to  read.  Rut  when  Sir  Thomas 
Browne  wrote  his  “Religio  Medici”  it  was  with  an  art 
made  up  of  obedience  to  personal  law  and  abandon- 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


176 

ment  to  free  inspiration  which  still  ravishes  us.  It  is 
extraordinary  how  far  indifference  or  incorrection  of 
style  may  be  carried  and  yet  remain  completely  ad¬ 
equate  even  to  complex  and  subtle  ends.  Pepys  wrote 
his  “  Diary,”  at  the  outset  of  a  life  full  of  strenuous 
work  and  not  a  little  pleasure,  with  a  rare  devotion  in¬ 
deed,  but  with  a  concision  and  carelessness,  a  single 
eye  on  the  fact  itself,  and  an  extraordinary  absence  of 
self-consciousness  which  rob  it  of  all  claim  to  possess 
what  we  conventionally  term  style.  Yet  in  this  vehicle 
he  has  perfectly  conveyed  not  merely  the  most  vividly 
realised  and  delightfully  detailed  picture  of  a  past  age 
ever  achieved  in  any  language,  but  he  has,  moreover, 
painted  a  psychological  portrait  of  himself  which  for 
its  serenely  impartial  justice,  its  subtle  gradations,  its 
bold  juxtapositions  of  colours,  has  all  the  qualities  of 
the  finest  Velasquez.  There  is  no  style  here,  we  say, 
merely  the  diarist,  writing  with  careless  poignant 
vitality  for  his  own  eye,  and  yet  no  style  that  we  could 
conceive  would  be  better  fitted,  or  so  well  fitted,  for 
the  miracle  that  has  here  been  effected. 

The  personal  freedom  of  Browne  led  up  to  splendour, 
and  that  of  Pepys  to  clarity.  But  while  splendour  is 
not  the  whole  of  writing,  neither,  although  one  returns 
to  it  again  and  again,  is  clarity.  Here  we  come  from 
another  side  on  to  a  point  we  had  already  reached. 
Bergson,  in  reply  to  the  question:  “Comment  doi- 
vent  6crire  les  Philosophes?”  lets  fall  some  observa¬ 
tions,  which,  as  he  himself  remarks,  concern  other 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


*77 

writers  beside  philosophers.  A  technical  word,  he  re¬ 
marks,  even  a  word  invented  for  the  occasion  or  used 
in  a  special  sense,  is  always  in  its  place  provided  the 
instructed  reader  —  though  the  difficulty,  as  he  fails  to 
point  out,  is  to  be  sure  of  possessing  this  instructed 
reader  —  accepts  it  so  easily  as  not  even  to  notice  it, 
and  he  proceeds  to  say  that  in  philosophic  prose,  and 
in  all  prose,  and  indeed  in  all  the  arts,  “the  perfect  ex¬ 
pression  is  that  which  has  come  so  naturally,  or  rather 
so  necessarily,  by  virtue  of  so  imperious  a  predestina¬ 
tion,  that  we  do  not  pause  before  it,  but  go  straight  on 
to  what  it  seeks  to  express,  as  though  it  were  blended 
with  the  idea;  it  became  invisible  by  force  of  being 
transparent.”1  That  is  well  said.  Bergson  also  is  on 
the  side  of  clarity.  Yet  I  do  not  feel  that  that  is  all 
there  is  to  say.  Style  is  not  a  sheet  of  glass  in  which  the 
only  thing  that  matters  is  the  absence  of  flaws.  Berg¬ 
son’s  own  style  is  not  so  diaphanous  that  one  never 
pauses  to  admire  its  quality,  nor,  as  a  hostile  critic 
(Edouard  Dujardin)  has  shown,  is  it  always  so  clear 
as  to  be  transparent.  The  dancer  in  prose  as  well  as  in 
verse  —  philosopher  or  whatever  he  may  be  —  must 
reveal  all  his  limbs  through  the  garment  he  wears;  yet 
the  garment  must  have  its  own  proper  beauty,  and 
there  is  a  failure  of  art,  a  failure  of  revelation,  if  it  pos¬ 
sesses  no  beauty.  Style  indeed  is  not  really  a  mere 
invisible  transparent  medium,  it  is  not  really  a  gar¬ 
ment,  but,  as  Gourmont  said,  the  very  thought  itself. 

1  Ls  Monde  Nouveau,  15th  December,  19 2X. 


178  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

It  is  the  miraculous  transubstantiation  of  a  spiritual 
body,  given  to  us  in  the  only  form  in  which  we  may 
receive  and  absorb  that  body,  and  unless  its  clarity  is 
balanced  by  its  beauty  it  is  not  adequate  to  sustain 
that  most  high  function.  No  doubt,  if  we  lean  on  one 
side  more  than  the  other,  it  is  clarity  rather  than  beauty 
which  we  should  choose,  for  on  the  other  side  we  may 
have,  indeed,  a  Sir  Thomas  Browne,  and  there  we  are 
conscious  not  so  much  of  a  transubstantiation  as  of  a 
garment,  with  thick  embroidery,  indeed,  and  glisten¬ 
ing  jewels,  but  we  are  not  always  sure  that  much  is 
hidden  beneath.  A  step  further  and  we  reach  D’An¬ 
nunzio,  a  splendid  mask  with  nothing  beneath,  just 
as  in  the  streets  of  Rome  one  may  sometimes  meet 
a  Franciscan  friar  with  a  head  superb  as  a  Roman 
Emperor’s  and  yet,  one  divines,  it  means  nothing. 
The  Italian  writer,  it  is  significant  to  note,  chose  so 
ostentatiously  magnificent  a  name  as  Gabriele  D’An¬ 
nunzio  to  conceal  a  real  name  which  was  nothing. 
The  great  angels  of  annunciation  create  the  beauty  of 
their  own  real  names.  Who  now  finds  Shakespeare 
ridiculous?  And  how  lovely  a  name  is  Keats! 

As  a  part  of  the  harmony  of  art,  which  is  necessarily 
made  out  of  conflict,  we  have  to  view  that  perpetual 
seeming  alternation  between  the  two  planes — the  plane 
of  vision  and  the  plane  of  creation,  the  form  within 
and  the  garment  that  clothes  it  —  which  may  some¬ 
times  distract  the  artist  himself.  The  prophet  Jeremiah 
once  said  (and  modem  prophets  have  doubtless  had 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


179 

occasion  to  recognise  the  truth  of  his  remark)  that  he 
seemed  to  the  people  round  him  only  as  “one  that  hath 
a  pleasant  voice  and  can  play  well  on  an  instrument.” 
But  he  failed  to  understand  that  it  was  only  through 
this  quality  of  voice  and  instrument  that  his  lamenta¬ 
tions  had  any  vital  force  or  even  any  being,  and  that 
if  the  poem  goes  the  message  goes.  Indeed,  that  is 
true  of  all  his  fellow  prophets  of  the  Old  Testament 
and  the  New  who  have  fascinated  mankind  with  the 
sound  of  those  harps  that  they  had  once  hung  by  the 
waters  of  Babylon.  The  whole  Bible,  we  may  be  very 
sure,  would  have  long  ago  been  forgotten  by  all  but 
a  few  intelligent  archaeologists,  if  men  had  not  heard 
in  it,  again  and  again  and  again,  “one  that  hath  a 
pleasant  voice  and  can  play  well  on  an  instrument.” 
Socrates  said  that  philosophy  was  simply  music.  But 
the  same  might  be  said  of  religion.  The  divine  dance 
of  satyrs  and  nymphs  to  the  sound  of  pipes  —  it  is 
the  symbol  of  life  which  in  one  form  or  another  has 
floated  before  human  eyes  from  the  days  of  the  sculp¬ 
tors  of  Greek  bas-reliefs  to  the  men  of  our  own  day 
who  catch  the  glimpse  of  new  harmonies  in  the  pages 
of  “L’Esprit  Nouveau.”  We  cannot  but  follow  the 
piper  that  knows  how  to  play,  even  to  our  own  de¬ 
struction.  There  may  be  much  that  is  objectionable 
about  Man.  But  he  has  that  engaging  trait.  And  the 
world  will  end  when  he  has  lost  it. 

One  asks  one’s  self  how  it  was  that  the  old  way  of 
writing,  as  a  personal  art,  gave  place  to  the  new  way  of 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


I  So 

writing,  as  a  mere  impersonal  pseudo-scicnce,  rigidly 
bound  by  formal  and  artificial  rules.  The  answer,  no 
doubt,  is  to  be  found  in  the  existence  of  a  great  new 
current  of  thought  which  began  mightily  to  stir  in 
men’s  minds  towards  the  end  of  the  seventeenth 
century.  It  will  be  remembered  that  it  was  at  that 
time,  both  in  England  and  France,  that  the  new  de¬ 
vitalised,  though  more  flexible,  prose  appeared,  with 
its  precision  and  accuracy,  its  conscious  orderliness,  its 
deliberate  method.  But  only  a  few  years  before,  over 
France  and  England  alike,  a  great  intellectual  wave 
had  swept,  imparting  to  the  mathematical  and  geo¬ 
metrical  sciences,  to  astronomy,  physics,  and  allied 
studies,  an  impetus  that  they  had  never  received  be¬ 
fore  on  so  great  a  scale.  Descartes  in  France  and  New¬ 
ton  in  England  stand  out  as  the  typical  representatives 
of  the  movement.  If  that  movement  had  to  exert  any 
influence  on  language  —  and  we  know  how  sensitively 
language  reacts  to  thought  —  it  could  have  been  mani¬ 
fested  in  no  other  way  than  by  the  change  which  actu¬ 
ally  took  place.  And  there  was  every  opportunity  for 
that  influence  to  be  exerted.1  This  sudden  expansion 
of  the  mathematical  and  geometrical  sciences  was  so 
great  and  novel  that  interest  in  it  was  not  confined  to 

1  Ferris  Creenslet  (in  his  study  of  Joseph  Glanvill,  p.  183),  referring  to 
the  Cartesian  influence  on  English  prose  style,  quotes  from  Sprat’s 
History  of  the  Royal  Society  that  the  Society  “exacted  from  its  members 
a  close,  naked,  natural  way  of  speaking,  positive  expressions,  a  native 
easiness,  bringing  ail  things  as  near  the  mathematic  plainness  as  they 
can.”  The  Society  passed  a  resolution  to  reject  “all  amplifications,  di¬ 
gressions,  and  swellings  of  style.” 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING  181 

a  small  band  of  men  of  science:  it  excited  the  man  in 
the  street,  the  woman  in  the  drawing-room;  it  was  in¬ 
deed  a  woman,  a  bright  and  gay  woman  of  the  world, 
who  translated  Newton’s  profound  book  into  French. 
Thus  it  was  that  the  new  qualities  of  style  were  in¬ 
vented,  not  merely  to  express  new  qualities  of  thought, 
but  because  new  scientific  ideals  were  moving  within 
vhe  minds  of  men.  A  similar  reaction  of  thought  on 
language  took  place  at  the  beginning  of  the  nine¬ 
teenth  century,  when  an  attempt  was  made  to  vitalise 
language  once  more,  and  to  break  the  rigid  and  formal 
moulds  the  previous  century  had  constructed.  The 
attempt  was  immediately  preceded  by  the  awakening 
of  a  new  group  of  sciences,  but  this  time  the  sciences  of 
life,  the  biological  studies  associated  with  Cuvier  and 
Lamarck,  with  John  Hunter  and  Erasmus  Darwin. 
With  the  twentieth  century  we  see  the  temporary 
exhaustion  of  the  biological  spirit  with  its  historical 
form  in  science  and  its  romantic  form  in  art,  and  we 
have  a  neo-classic  spirit  which  has  involved  a  renais¬ 
sance  of  the  mathematical  sciences  and,  even  before 
that,  was  beginning  to  affect  speech. 

To  admire  the  old  writers,  because  for  them  writing 
was  an  art  to  be  exercised  freely  and  not  a  vain  attempt 
to  follow  after  the  ideals  of  the  abstract  sciences,  thus 
by  no  means  implies  a  contempt  for  that  decorum  and 
orderliness  without  which  all  written  speech  must  be 
ineffective  and  obscure.  The  great  writers  in  the  great 
ages,  standing  above  classicism  and  above  romanti- 


1 82 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


'  7 


cism,  have  always  observed  this  decorum  and  orderli¬ 
ness.  In  their  hands  such  observance  was  not  a  servile 
and  rigid  adherence  to  external  rules,  but  a  beautiful 
convention,  an  instinctive  fine  breeding,  such  as  is 
naturally  observed  in  human  intercourse  when  it  is 
not  broken  down  by  intimacy  or  by  any  great  crisis  of 
life  or  of  death. 

The  freedom  of  art  by  no  means  involves  the  easiness 
of  art.  It  may  rather,  indeed,  be  said  the  difficulty  in¬ 
creases  with  freedom,  for  to  make  things  in  accordance 
with  patterns  is  ever  the  easiest  task.  The  problem  is 
equally  arduous  for  those  who,  so  far  as  their  craft  is 
conscious,  seek  an  impersonal  and  for  those  who  seek  a 
personal  ideal  of  style.  Flaubert  sought  —  in  vain,  it  is 
true  —  to  be  the  most  objective  of  artists  and  to  mould 
speech  with  heroic  energy  in  shapes  of  abstract  per¬ 
fection.  Nietzsche,  one  of  the  most  personal  artists  in 
style,  sought  likewise,  in  his  own  words,  to  work  at  a 
page  of  prose  as  a  sculptor  works  at  a  statue.  Though 
the  result  is  not  perhaps  fundamentally  different, 
whichever  ideal  it  is  that,  consciously  or  instinctively,  is 
followed,  the  personal  road  of  style  is  doubtless  theo¬ 
retically  —  though  not  necessarily  in  practice  —  the 
sounder,  usually  also  that  which  moves  most  of  us 
more  profoundly.  The  great  prose  writers  of  the  Second 
Empire  in  France  made  an  unparalleled  effort  to  carve 
or  paint  impersonal  prose,  but  its  final  beauty  and  ef¬ 
fectiveness  seem  scarcely  equal  to  the  splendid  energy 
it  embodies.  Jules  de  Goncourt,  his  brother  thought, 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING  183 

literally  died  from  the  mental  exhaustion  of  his  un¬ 
ceasing  struggle  to  attain  an  objective  style  adequate 
to  express  the  subtle  texture  of  the  world  as  he  saw  it. 
But,  while  the  Goncourts  are  great  figures  in  literary 
history,  they  have  pioneered  no  new  road,  nor  are  they 
of  the  writers  whom  men  continuously  love  to  read; 
for  it  is  as  a  document  that  the  “Journal”  remains  of 
enduring  value. 

Yet  the  great  writers  of  any  school  bear  witness, 
each  in  his  own  way,  that,  deeper  than  these  conven¬ 
tions  and  decorums  of  style,  there  is  a  law  which  no 
writer  can  escape  from,  a  law  which  must  needs  be 
learnt,  but  can  never  be  taught.  That  is  the  law  of  the 
logic  of  thought.  All  the  conventional  rules  of  the 
construction  of  speech  may  be  put  aside  if  a  writer  is 
thereby  enabled  to  follow  more  closely  and  lucidly  the 
form  and  process  of  his  thought.  It  is  the  law  of  that 
logic  that  he  must  for  ever  follow  and  in  attaining  it 
alone  find  rest.  He  may  say  of  it  as  devoutly  as  Dante : 
“In  la  sua  voluntade  £  nostra  pace.”  All  progress  in 
literary  style  lies  in  the  heroic  resolve  to  cast  aside 
accretions  and  exuberances,  all  the  conventions  of  a 
past  age  that  were  once  beautiful  because  alive  and  are 
now  false  because  dead.  The  simple  and  naked  beauty 
of  Swift’s  style,  sometimes  so  keen  and  poignant,  rests 
absolutely  on  this  truth  to  the  logic  of  his  thought. 
The  twin  qualities  of  flexibility  and  intimacy  are  of 
the  essence  of  all  progress  in  the  art  of  language,  and 
in  their  progressive  achievement  lies  the  attainment  of 


1 84  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

great  literature.  If  we  compare  Shakespeare  with  his 
predecessors  and  contemporaries,  we  can  scarcely  say 
that  in  imaginative  force  he  is  vastly  superior  to  Mar¬ 
lowe,  or  in  intellectual  grip  to  Jonson,  but  he  im¬ 
measurably  surpasses  them  in  flexibility  and  in  in¬ 
timacy.  He  was  able  with  an  incomparable  art  to 
weave  a  garment  of  speech  so  flexible  in  its  strength, 
so  intimate  in  its  transparence,  that  it  lent  itself  to 
every  shade  of  emotion  and  the  quickest  turns  of 
thought.  When  we  compare  the  heavy  and  formal 
letters  of  Bacon,  even  to  his  closest  friends,  with 
the  ‘‘Familiar  Letters"  of  the  vivacious  Welshman 
Howell,  we  can  scarcely  believe  the  two  men  were 
contemporaries,  so  incomparably  more  expressive, 
so  flexible  and  so  intimate,  is  the  style  of  Howell. 
All  the  writers  who  influence  those  who  come  after 
them  have  done  so  by  the  same  method.  They  have 
thrown  aside  the  awkward  and  outworn  garments  of 
speech,  they  have  woven  a  simpler  and  more  familiar 
speech,  able  to  express  subtleties  or  audacities  that 
before  seemed  inexpressible.  That  was  once  done  in 
English  verse  by  Cowper  and  Wordsworth,  in  English 
prose  by  Addison  and  Lamb.  That  has  been  done  in 
French  to-day  by  Proust  and  in  English  by  Joyce. 
When  a  great  writer,  like  Carlyle  or  Browning,  creates 
a  speech  of  his  own  which  is  too  clumsy  to  be  flexible 
and  too  heavy  to  be  intimate,  he  may  arouse  the  ad¬ 
miration  of  his  fellows,  but  he  leaves  no  traces  on  the 
speech  of  the  men  who  come  after  him.  It  is  not  easy 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING  185 

to  believe  that  such  will  be  Joyce’s  fate.  His  “ Ulysses” 
• —  carrying  to  a  much  further  point  qualities  that  be¬ 
gan  to  appear  in  his  earlier  work  —  has  been  hailed 
as  epoch-making  in  English  literature,  though  a  dis¬ 
tinguished  critic  holds  that  it  is  this  rather  by  closing 
than  by  opening  an  epoch.  It  would  still  be  preparing 
a  new  road,  and  as  thus  operative  we  may  accept  it 
without  necessarily  judging  it  to  be  at  the  same  time  a 
master-work,  provided  we  understand  what  it  is  that 
has  been  here  attempted.  This  huge  Odyssey  is  an 
ordinary  day’s  history  in  the  ordinary  life  of  one 
ordinary  man  and  the  persons  of  his  immediate  envi¬ 
ronment.  It  is  here  sought  to  reproduce  as  Art  the 
whole  of  the  man’s  physical  and  psychic  activity  dur¬ 
ing  that  period,  omitting  nothing,  not  even  the  actions 
which  the  most  naturalistic  of  novelists  had  hitherto 
thought  too  trivial  or  too  indelicate  to  mention.  Not 
only  the  thoughts  and  impulses  that  result  in  action, 
but  also  the  thoughts  and  emotions  that  drift  aimlessly 
across  the  field  of  his  consciousness,  are  here;  and,  in 
the  presentation  of  this  combined  inner  and  outer  life, 
Joyce  has  sometimes  placed  both  on  the  same  plane, 
achieving  a  new  simplicity  of  style,  though  we  may  at 
first  sometimes  find  it  hard  to  divine  what  is  outer  and 
what  inner.  Moreover,  he  never  hesitates,  when  he 
pleases,  to  change  the  tone  of  his  style  and  even  to 
adopt  without  notice,  in  a  deliberately  ironical  and 
chameleon-like  fashion,  the  manner  of  other  writers. 
In  these  ways  Joyce  has  here  achieved  that  new 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


1 86 

intimacy  of  vision,  that  new  flexibility  of  expression, 
which  are  of  the  essence  of  all  great  literature  at  its 
vitally  moving  point  of  advance.  He  has  succeeded  in 
realising  and  making  manifest  in  art  what  others  had 
passed  over  or  failed  to  see.  If  in  that  difficult  and 
dangerous  task  he  has  failed,  as  some  of  us  may  believe, 
to  reach  either  complete  clarity  or  complete  beauty, 
fee  has  at  all  events  made  it  possible  for  those  who 
come  after  to  reach  a  new  height  which,  without  the 
help  of  the  road  he  had  constructed,  they  might  have 
missed,  or  even  failed  to  conceive,  and  that  is  enough 
for  any  writer’s  fame. 

When  we  turn  to  Proust  we  are  in  the  presence  of  a 
writer  about  whom,  no  doubt,  there  is  no  violent  dis¬ 
pute.  There  may  be  much  about  his  work  that  is 
disturbing  to  many,  but  he  was  not  concerned,  like 
Joyce,  to  affront  so  many  prejudices,  and  in  France  it 
is  not  even  necessary,  for  the  road  has  already  been 
prepared  by  heroic  pioneers  of  old  during  a  thousand 
years.  But  the  writer  who  brings  a  new  revelation  is 
not  necessarily  called  upon  to  invite  the  execration  of 
the  herd.  That  is  a  risk  he  must  be  called  upon  to  face, 
it  is  not  an  inevitable  fate.  When  the  mob  yell: 
“Crucify  him!  Crucify  him!”  the  artist,  in  whatever 
medium,  hears  a  voice  from  Heaven:  “This  is  my  be¬ 
loved  son.”  Yet  it  is  conceivable  that  the  more  per¬ 
fectly  a  new  revelation  is  achieved  the  less  antagonism 
it  arouses.  Proust  has  undoubtedly  been  the  master 
of  a  new  intimacy  of  vision,  a  new  flexibility  of  ex- 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 


187 


pression.  even  though  the  style  through  which  the 
revelation  has  been  made,  perhaps  necessarily  on 
account  of  the  complexity  involved,  has  remained  a 
little  difficult  and  also,  it  must  be  said,  a  little  negli¬ 
gent.  But  it  has  achieved  a  considerable  degree  of 
clarity  and  a  high  degree  of  beauty.  So  there  is  less 
difficulty  in  recognising  a  great  masterpiece  in  “A  la 
Recherche  du  Temps  Perdu”  than  if  it  were  more  con¬ 
spicuously  the  work  of  a  daring  pioneer.  It  is  seen  as 
the  revelation  of  a  new  aesthetic  sensibility  embodied 
in  a  new  and  fitting  style.  Marcel  Proust  has  ex¬ 
perienced  clearly  what  others  have  felt  dimly  or  not 
at  all.  The  significance  of  his  work  is  thus  altogether 
apart  from  the  power  of  its  dramatic  incidents  or  its 
qualities  as  a  novel.  To  the  critic  of  defective  intelli¬ 
gence,  craving  for  scenes  of  sensation,  it  has  sometimes 
seemed  that  “A  l’Ombre  des  Jeunes  Filles  en  Fleur” 
is  the  least  important  section  of  Proust’s  work.  Yet  it 
is  on  that  quiet  and  uneventful  tract  of  his  narrative 
that  Proust  has  most  surely  set  the  stamp  of  his  gen¬ 
ius,  a  genius,  I  should  like  to  add,  which  is  peculiarly 
congenial  to  the  English  mind  because  it  was  in  the 
English  tradition,  rather  than  in  the  French  tradition, 
that  Proust  was  moving.1 

1  If  it  is  asked  why  I  take  examples  of  a  quality  in  art  that  is  univer¬ 
sal  from  literary  personalities  that  to  many  are  questionable,  even  mor¬ 
bid  or  perverse,  rather  than  from  some  more  normal  and  unquestioned 
figure,  Thomas  Hardy,  lor  example,  I  would  reply  that  I  have  always  re¬ 
garded  it  as  more  helpful  and  instructive  to  take  examples  that  are  still 
questionable  rather  than  to  fall  back  on  the  unquestionable  that  all  will 
accept  tamely  without  thought.  Forty  years  ago,  when  Hardy's  genius 


i88 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


No  doubt  it  is  possible  for  a  writer  to  go  far  by  the 
exercise  of  a  finely  attentive  docility.  By  a  dutiful 
study  of  what  other  people  have  said,  by  a  refined 
cleverness  in  catching  their  tricks,  and  avoiding  their 
subtleties,  their  profundities,  their  audacities,  by,  in 
short,  a  patient  perseverance  in  writing  out  copper¬ 
plate  maxims  in  elegant  copybooks,  he  can  become  at 
last,  like  Stevenson,  the  idol  of  the  crowd.  But  the 
great  writer  can  only  learn  out  of  himself.  He  learns 
to  write  as  a  child  learns  to  walk.  For  the  laws  of  the 
logic  of  thought  are  not  other  than  those  of  physical 
movement.  There  is  stumbling,  awkwardness,  hesita¬ 
tion,  experiment  —  before  at  last  the  learner  attains 
the  perfect  command  of  that  divine  rhythm  and  peril¬ 
ous  poise  in  which  he  asserts  his  supreme  human  privi¬ 
lege.  But  the  process  of  his  learning  rests  ultimately 
on  his  own  structure  and  function  and  not  on  others’ 
example.  li Style  must  be  founded  upon  models”;  it  is 
the  rule  set  up  by  the  pedant  who  knows  nothing  of 
what  style  means.  For  the  style  that  is  founded  on  a 
model  is  the  negation  of  style. 

The  ardour  and  heroism  of  great  achievement  in 
style  never  grow  less  as  the  ages  pass,  but  rather  tend 
to  grow  more.  That  is  so,  not  merely  because  the 
hardest  tasks  are  left  for  the  last,  but  because  of  the 
ever  increasing  impediments  placed  in  the  path  of 

was  scarcely  at  all  recognised,  it  seemed  worth  while  to  me  to  set  forth 
the  quality  of  his  genius.  To-day,  when  that  quality  is  unquestioned, 
and  Hardy  receives  general  love  and  reverence,  it  would  seem  idle  and 
unprofitable  to  do  so. 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING  i8q 

style  by  the  piling  up  of  mechanical  rules  and  rigid 
conventions.  It  is  doubtful  whether  on  the  whole  the 
forces  of  life  really  gain  on  the  surrounding  inertia  o i 
death.  The  greatest  writers  must  spend  the  blood  and 
sweat  of  their  souls,  amid  the  execration  and  disdain 
of  their  contemporaries,  in  breaking  the  old  moulds  of 
style  and  pouring  their  fresh  life  into  new  moulds. 
From  Dante  to  Carducci,  from  Rabelais  to  Proust, 
from  Chaucer  to  Whitman,  the  giants  of  letters  have 
been  engaged  in  this  life-giving  task,  and  behind  them 
the  forces  of  death  swiftly  gather  again.  Here  there 
is  always  room  for  the  hero.  No  man,  indeed,  can 
write  anything  that  matters  who  is  not  a  hero  at  heart, 
even  though  to  the  people  who  pass  him  in  the  street 
or  know  him  in  the  house  he  may  seem  as  gentle  as  any 
dove.  If  all  progress  lies  in  an  ever  greater  flexibility  and 
intimacy  of  speech,  a  finer  adaptation  to  the  heights 
and  depths  of  the  mobile  human  soul,  the  task  can 
never  be  finally  completed.  Every  writer  is  called 
afresh  to  reveal  new  strata  of  life.  By  digging  in  his 
own  soul  he  becomes  the  discoverer  of  the  soul  of  his 
family,  of  his  nation,  of  the  race,  of  the  heart  of  human¬ 
ity.  For  the  great  writer  finds  style  as  the  mystic  find& 
God,  in  his  own  soul.  It  is  the  final  utterance  of  a  sigh, 
which  none  could  utter  before  him,  and  which  all  can 
who  follow. 

In  the  end,  it  will  be  seen  we  return  at  last  to  the 
point  from  which  we  start.  We  have  completed  the 
cycle  of  an  art’s  evolution,  —  and  it  might,  indeed,  be 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


any  other  art  as  much  as  writing,  —  reaching  in  the 
final  sweep  of  ever  wider  flights  the  fact  from  which 
we  started,  but  seeing  it  anew,  with  a  fresh  universal 
significance.  Writing  is  an  arduous  spiritual  and  in¬ 
tellectual  task,  only  to  be  achieved  by  patient  and  de¬ 
liberate  labour  and  much  daring.  Yet  therewith  we 
are  only  at  the  beginning.  Writing  is  also  the  expres¬ 
sion  of  individual  personality,  which  springs  up  spon¬ 
taneously,  or  is  slowly  drawn  up  from  within,  out  of 
a  well  of  inner  emotions  which  none  may  command. 
But  even  with  these  two  opposite  factors  we  have  not 
attained  the  complete  synthesis.  For  style  in  the  full 
sense  is  more  than  the  deliberate  and  designed  creation, 
more  even  than  the  unconscious  and  involuntary  crea¬ 
tion,  of  the  individual  man  who  therein  expresses  him¬ 
self.  The  self  that  he  thus  expresses  is  a  bundle  of  in¬ 
herited  tendencies  that  came  the  man  himself  can 
never  entirely  know  whence.  It  is  by  the  instinctive 
stress  of  a  highly  sensitive,  or  slightly  abnormal  con¬ 
stitution,  that  he  is  impelled  to  instil  these  tendencies 
into  the  alien  magic  of  words.  The  stylum  wherewith 
he  strives  to  write  himself  on  the  yet  blank  pages  of 
the  world  may  have  the  obstinate  vigour  of  the  metal 
rod  or  the  wild  and  quavering  waywardness  of  an  in¬ 
sect’s  wing,  but  behind  it  lie  forces  that  extend  into 
infinity.  It  moves  us  because  it  is  itself  moved  by 
pulses  which  in  varying  measure  we  also  have  in¬ 
herited,  and  because  its  primary  source  is  in  the  heart 
of  a  cosmos  from  which  we  ourselves  spring. 


CHAPTER  V 
THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 

I 

Religion  is  a  large  word,  of  good  import  and  of  evil 
import,  and  with  the  general  discussion  of  religion  we 
are  not  in  this  place  concerned.  Its  quintessential 
core  —  which  is  the  art  of  finding  our  emotional  re¬ 
lationship  to  the  world  conceived  as  a  whole  —  is  all 
that  here  matters,  and  it  is  best  termed  “Mysticism.” 
No  doubt  it  needs  some  courage  to  use  that  word.  It 
is  the  common  label  of  abuse  applied  to  every  pseudo¬ 
spiritual  thing  that  is  held  up  for  contempt.  Yet  it 
would  be  foolish  to  allow  ourselves  to  be  deflected  from 
the  right  use  of  a  word  by  the  accident  of  its  abuse. 
“Mysticism,”  however  often  misused,  will  here  be 
used,  because  it  is  the  correct  term  for  the  relationship 
of  the  Self  to  the  Not-Self,  of  the  individual  to  a  Whole, 
when,  going  beyond  his  own  personal  ends,  he  dis¬ 
covers  his  adjustment  to  larger  ends,  in  harmony  or 
devotion  or  love. 

It  has  become  a  commonplace  among  the  unthink 
ing,  or  those  who  think  badly,  to  assume  an  oppose 
tion  of  hostility  between  mysticism  and  science.1  If 

1  It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  remark  that  if  we  choose  to  give  to 
“ mysticism”  a  definition  incompatible  with  “science,”  the  opposition 
cannot  be  removed.  This  is,  for  example,  done  by  Croce,  who  yet  recog¬ 
nises  as  highly  important  a  process  of  “conversion”  which  is  nothing 
else  but  mysticism  as  here  understood.  (See,  e.g.,  Piccoli,  Benedetto 
Croce ,  p.  184.)  Only  he  has  left  himself  no  name  to  applv  to  it. 


192 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


“science”  is,  as  we  have  some  reason  to  believe,  an 
art,  if  “mysticism”  also  is  an  art,  the  opposition  can 
scarcely  be  radical  since  they  must  both  spring  from 
the  same  root  in  natural  human  activity. 

II 

If,  indeed,  by  “science”  we  mean  the  organisation  of 
an  intellectual  relationship  to  the  world  we  live  in  ad¬ 
equate  to  give  us  some  degree  of  power  over  that 
world,  and  if  by  “mysticism”  we  mean  the  joyful 
organisation  of  an  emotional  relationship  to  the  world 
conceived  as  a  whole,1  the  opposition  which  we  usually 
assume  to  exist  between  them  is  of  comparatively 
modern  origin. 

Among  savage  peoples  such  an  opposition  can 
scarcely  be  said  to  have  any  existence.  The  very  fact 
that  science,  in  the  strict  sense,  seems  often  to  begin  with 
the  stars  might  itself  have  suggested  that  the  basis 
of  science  is  mystical  contemplation.  Not  only  is  there 
usually  no  opposition  between  the  “scientific”  and  the 
“mystical”  attitude  among  peoples  we  may  fairly  call 
primitive,  but  the  two  attitudes  may  be  combined  in 
the  same  person.  The  “medicine-man ”  is  not  more  an 
embryonic  man  of  science  than  he  is  an  embryonic 
mystic;  he  is  both  equally.  He  cultivates  not  only 

1  “The  endeavour  of  the  human  mind  to  enjoy  the  blessedness  of 
actual  communion  with  the  highest,"  which  is  Pringle  Pattison’s  widely 
accepted  definition  of  mysticism,  1  prefer  not  to  use  because  it  is  ambig¬ 
uous.  The  “endeavour,”  while  it  indicates  that  we  are  concerned  with 
an  art,  also  suggests  its  strained  pathological  forms,  while  “actual  com¬ 
munion"  lends  itself  to  ontological  interpretations. 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


193 

magic  but  holiness,  he  achieves  the  conquest  of  his  own 
soul,  he  enters  into  harmony  with  the  universe;  and  in 
doing  this,  and  partly,  indeed,  through  doing  this,  his 
knowledge  is  increased,  his  sensations  and  power  of 
observation  are  rendered  acute,  and  he  is  enabled  so 
to  gain  organised  knowledge  of  natural  processes  that 
he  can  to  some  extent  foresee  or  even  control  those 
processes.  He  is  the  ancestor  alike  of  the  hermit  fol¬ 
lowing  after  sanctity  and  of  the  inventor  crystallising 
discoveries  into  profitable  patents.  Such  is  the  medi¬ 
cine-man  wherever  we  may  find  him  in  his  typical 
shape  —  which  he  cannot  always  adequately  achieve 
—  all  over  the  world,  around  Torres  Straits  just  as 
much  as  around  Behring’s  Straits.  Yet  we  have  failed 
to  grasp  the  significance  of  this  fact. 

It  is  the  business  of  the  Shaman ,  as  on  the  mystical 
side  we  may  conveniently  term  the  medicine-man, 
to  place  himself  under  the  conditions  —  and  even  in 
primitive  life  those  conditions  are  varied  and  subtle  — 
which  bring  his  will  into  harmony  with  the  essence  of 
the  world,  so  that  he  grows  one  with  that  essence, 
that  its  will  becomes  his  will,  and,  reversely,  that,  in  a 
sense,  his  will  becomes  its.  Herewith,  in  this  unity 
with  the  spirit  of  the  world,  the  possibility  of  magic 
and  the  power  to  control  the  operation  of  Nature  are 
introduced  into  human  thought,  with  its  core  of 
reality  and  its  endless  trail  of  absurdity,  persisting 
even  into  advanced  civilisation. 

But  this  harmony  with  the  essence  of  the  universes 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


194 

this  control  of  Nature  through  oneness  with  Nature, 
is  not  only  at  the  heart  of  religion ;  it  is  also  at  the  heart 
of  science.  It  is  only  by  the  possession  of  an  acquired 
or  inborn  temperament  attuned  to  the  temperament 
of  Nature  that  a  Faraday  or  an  Edison,  that  any  scien¬ 
tific  discoverer  or  inventor,  can  achieve  his  results. 
And  the  primitive  medicine-man,  who  on  the  religious 
side  has  attained  harmony  of  the  self  with  the  Not- 
Self,  and  by  obeying  learnt  to  command,  cannot  fail 
on  the  scientific  side  also,  under  the  special  conditions 
of  his  isolated  life,  to  acquire  an  insight  into  natural 
methods,  a  practical  power  over  human  activities  and 
over  the  treatment  of  disease,  such  as  on  the  imagina¬ 
tive  and  emotional  side  he  already  possesses.  If  we  are 
able  to  see  this  essential  and  double  attitude  of  the 
Shaman  —  medicine-man  —  if  we  are  able  to  elimi¬ 
nate  all  the  extraneous  absurdities  and  the  extrava¬ 
gancies  which  conceal  the  real  nature  of  his  function 
in  the  primitive  world,  the  problem  of  science  and 
mysticism,  and  their  relationship  to  each  other,  ceases 
to  have  difficulties  for  us. 

It  is  as  well  to  point  out,  before  passing  on,  that  the 
Investigators  of  primitive  thought  are  not  altogether 
in  agreement  with  one  another  on  this  question  of  the 
relation  of  science  to  magic,  and  have  complicated  the 
question  by  drawing  a  distinction  between  magic 
(understood  as  man’s  claim  to  control  Nature)  and  re¬ 
ligion  (understood  as  man’s  submission  to  Nature). 
The  difficulties  seem  due  to  an  attempt  to  introduce 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


195 

dear-cut  definitions  at  a  stage  of  thought  where  none 
such  existed.  That  medicine-men  and  priests  culti¬ 
vated  science,  while  wrapping  it  up  in  occult  and 
magical  forms,  seems  indicated  by  the  earliest  histori¬ 
cal  traditions  of  the  Near  East.  Herbert  Spencer  long 
ago  brought  together  much  of  the  evidence  on  this 
point.  McDougall  to-day  in  his  “Social  Psychology” 
(Chapter  XIII)  accepts  magic  as  the  origin  of  science, 
and  Frazer  in  the  early  edition  of  his  “Golden  Bough” 
regarded  magic  as  “the  savage  equivalent  of  our 
natural  science.”  Marett1  “profoundly  doubts”  this, 
and  declares  that  if  we  can  use  the  word  “science” 
at  all  in  such  a  context,  magic  is  occult  science  and  the 
very  antithesis  of  natural  science.  While  all  that 
Marett  states  is  admirably  true  on  the  basis  of  his  own 
definitions,  he  scarcely  seems  to  realise  the  virtue  of 
the  word  “equivalent,”  while  at  the  same  time,  it  may 
be,  his  definition  of  magic  is  too  narrow.  Silberer, 
from  the  psycho-analytic  standpoint,  accepting  the 
development  of  exact  science  from  one  branch  of  magic, 
points  out  that  science  is,  on  the  one  hand,  the  rec¬ 
ognition  of  concealed  natural  laws  and,  on  the  other, 
the  dynamisation  of  psychic  power,2  and  thus  falls 
into  two  great  classes,  according  as  its  operation  is 
external  or  internal.  This  seems  a  true  and  subtle  dis¬ 
tinction  which  Marett  has  overlooked.  In  the  latest 

% 

edition  of  his  work,3  Frazer  has  not  insisted  on  the 

1  The  Threshold  of  Religion  (1914),  p.  48. 

*  Zentralblatt  fur  Psychoanalyse  (1911),  p.  272. 

®  Golden  Bough ,  “Balder  the  Beautiful,”  vol.  11,  pp.  304-03. 


196  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

relation  or  analogy  of  science  to  magic,  but  has  been 
content  to  point  out  that  Man  has  passed  through  the 
three  stages  of  magic,  religion,  and  science.  “  In  magic 
Man  depends  on  his  own  strength  to  meet  the  diffi¬ 
culties  and  dangers  that  beset  him  on  every  side.  He 
believes  in  a  certain  established  order  of  Nature  on 
which  he  can  surely  count,  and  which  he  can  manipu¬ 
late  for  his  own  ends.”  Then  he  finds  he  has  over¬ 
estimated  his  own  powers  and  he  humbly  takes  the 
road  of  religion,  leaving  the  universe  to  the  more  or  less 
capricious  will  of  a  higher  power.  But  he  finds  this 
view  inadequate  and  he  proceeds  to  revert  in  a  meas¬ 
ure  to  the  older  standpoint  of  magic  by  postulating 
explicitly  what  in  magic  had  only  been  implicitly  as¬ 
sumed,  “to  wit,  an  inflexible  regularity  in  the  order  of 
natural  events  which,  if  carefully  observed,  enables  us 
to  foresee  their  course  with  certainty,  and  to  act  ac¬ 
cordingly.”  So  that  science,  in  Frazer’s  view,  is  not  so 
much  directly  derived  from  magic  as  itself  in  its 
original  shape  one  with  magic,  and  Man  has  pro¬ 
ceeded,  not  in  a  straight  line,  but  in  a  spiral. 

The  profound  significance  of  this  early  personage  is, 
however,  surely  clear.  If  science  and  mysticism  are 
alike  based  on  fundamental  natural  instincts,  appear¬ 
ing  spontaneously  all  over  the  world;  if,  moreover, 
they  naturally  tend  to  be  embodied  in  the  same  indi¬ 
vidual,  in  such  a  way  that  each  impulse  would  seem  to 
be  dependent  on  the  other  for  its  full  development; 
then  there  can  be  no  ground  for  accepting  any  dis- 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


197 


harmony  between  them.  The  course  of  human  evolu¬ 
tion  involves  a  division  of  labour,  a  specialisation  of 
science  and  of  mysticism  along  special  lines  and  in 
separate  individuals.1  But  a  fundamental  antagonism 
of  the  two,  it  becomes  evident,  is  not  to  be  thought  of ; 
it  is  unthinkable,  even  absurd.  If  at  some  period  in 
the  course  of  civilisation  we  seriously  find  that  our 
science  and  our  religion  are  antagonistic,  then  there 
must  be  something  wrong  either  with  our  science  or 
with  our  religion.  Perhaps  not  seldom  there  may  be 
something  wrong  with  both.  For  if  the  natural  im¬ 
pulses  which  normally  work  best  together  are  separated 
and  specialised  in  different  persons,  we  may  expect  to 
find  a  concomitant  state  of  atrophy  and  hypertrophy, 
both  alike  morbid.  The  scientific  person  will  become 
atrophied  on  the  mystical  side,  the  mystical  person  will 
become  atrophied  on  the  scientific  side.  Each  will  be¬ 
come  morbidly  hypertrophied  on  his  own  side.  But 
the  assumption  that,  because  there  is  a  lack  of  harmony 
between  opposing  pathological  states,  there  must  also 
be  a  similar  lack  of  harmony  in  the  normal  state,  is  un¬ 
reasonable.  We  must  severely  put  out  of  count  alike 
the  hypertrophied  scientific  people  with  atrophied 
religious  instincts,  and  the  hypertrophied  religious 

1  Farnell  even  asserts  (In  his  Greek  Hero  Cults)  that  “it  is  impossible 
to  quote  a  single  example  of  any  one  of  the  higher  world-religions  work¬ 
ing  in  harmony  with  the  development  of  physical  science.”  He  finds  a 
“special  and  unique”  exception  in  the  cult  of  Asclepios  at  Cos  and 
Epidauros  and  Pergamon,  where,  after  the  fourth  century  B.c.,  were 
physicians,  practising  a  rational  medical  science,  who  were  also  official 
priests  of  the  Asclepios  temples. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


people  with  atrophied  scientific  instincts.  Neither 
group  can  help  us  here;  they  only  introduce  confusion. 
We  have  to  examine  the  matter  critically,  to  go  back 
to  the  beginning,  to  take  so  wide  a  survey  of  the  phe¬ 
nomena  that  their  seemingly  conflicting  elements  fall 
into  harmony. 

The  fact,  in  the  first  place,  that  the  person  with  an 
overdeveloped  religious  sense  combined  with  an  under* 
developed  scientific  sense  necessarily  conflicts  with  a 
person  in  whom  the  reverse  state  of  affairs  exists,  can¬ 
not  be  doubted,  nor  is  the  reason  of  it  obscure.  It  is 
difficult  to  conceive  a  Darwin  and  a  St.  Theresa  enter¬ 
ing  with  full  and  genuine  sympathy  into  each  other’s 
point  of  view.  And  that  is  so  by  no  means  because  the 
two  attitudes,  stripped  of  all  but  their  essentials,  are 
irreconcilable.  If  we  strip  St.  Theresa  of  her  atrophied 
pseudo-science,  which  in  her  case  was  mostly  theo¬ 
logical  “science,”  there  was  nothing  in  her  attitude 
which  would  not  have  seemed  to  harmonise  and  to 
exalt  that  absolute  adoration  and  service  to  natural 
truth  which  inspired  Darwin.  If  we  strip  Darwin  of 
that  atrophied  sense  of  poetry  and  the  arts  which  he 
deplored,  and  that  anaemic  secular  conception  of  the 
universe  as  a  whole  which  he  seems  to  have  accepted 
without  deploring,  there  was  nothing  in  his  attitude 
which  would  not  have  served  to  fertilise  and  enrich 
the  spiritual  exaltation  of  Theresa  and  even  to  have 
removed  far  from  her  that  temptation  to  acedia  or 
slothfulness  which  all  the  mystics  who  are  mystics 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


199 

only  have  recognised  as  their  besetting  sin,  minimised 
as  it  was,  in  Theresa,  by  her  practical  activities.  Y et, 
being  as  they  were  persons  of  supreme  genius  de¬ 
veloped  on  opposite  sides  of  their  common  human 
nature,  an  impassable  gulf  lies  between  them.  It  lies 
equally  between  much  more  ordinary  people  who  yet 
show  the  same  common  character  of  being  undergrown 
on  one  side,  overgrown  on  the  other. 

This  difficulty  is  not  diminished  when  the  person 
who  is  thus  hypertrophied  on  one  side  and  atrophied 
on  the  other  suddenly  wakes  up  to  his  one-sided  state 
and  hastily  attempts  to  remedy  it.  The  very  fact  that 
such  a  one-sided  development  has  come  about  in¬ 
dicates  that  there  has  probably  been  a  congenital 
basis  for  it,  an  innate  disharmony  which  must  require 
infinite  patience  and  special  personal  experience  to 
overcome.  But  the  heroic  and  ostentatious  manner 
in  which  these  ill-balanced  people  hastily  attempt  the 
athletic  feat  of  restoring  their  spiritual  balance  has 
frequently  aroused  the  interest,  and  too  often  the 
amusement,  of  the  spectator.  Sir  Isaac  Newton,  one 
of  the  most  quintessentially  scientific  persons  the 
world  has  seen,  a  searcher  who  made  the  most  stupend¬ 
ous  effort  to  picture  the  universe  intelligently  on  its 
purely  intelligible  side,  seems  to  have  realised  in  old 
age,  when  he  was,  indeed,  approaching  senility,  that 
the  vast  hypertrophy  of  his  faculties  on  that  side  had 
not  been  compensated  by  any  development  on  the 
religious  side.  He  forthwith  set  himself  to  the  inter- 


200 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


pretation  of  the  Book  of  Daniel  and  puzzled  over  the 
prophecies  of  the  Book  of  Revelation,  with  the  same 
scientifically  serious  air  as  though  he  were  analysing 
the  spectrum.  In  reality  he  had  not  reached  the 
sphere  of  religion  at  all ;  he  had  merely  exchanged  good 
science  for  bad  science.  Such  senile  efforts  to  pene¬ 
trate,  ere  yet  life  is  quite  over,  the  mystery  of  religion 
recall,  and,  indeed,  have  a  real  analogy  to,  that  final 
effort  of  the  emotionally  starved  to  grasp  at  love  which 
has  been  called  “old  maid’s  insanity”;  and  just  as  in 
this  aberration  the  woman  who  has  all  her  life  put  love 
into  the  subconscious  background  of  her  mind  is  over¬ 
come  by  an  eruption  of  the  suppressed  emotions  and 
driven  to  create  baseless  legends  of  which  she  is  her¬ 
self  the  heroine,  so  the  scientific  man  who  has  put  re¬ 
ligion  into  the  subconscious  and  scarcely  known  that 
there  is  such  a  thing  may  become  in  the  end  the  victim 
of  an  imaginary  religion.  In  our  own  time  we  may  have 
witnessed  attempts  of  the  scientific  mind  to  become 
religious,  which,  without  amounting  to  mental  aber¬ 
ration,  are  yet  highly  instructive.  It  would  be  a  double- 
edged  compliment,  in  this  connection,  to  compare  Sir 
Oliver  Lodge  to  Sir  Isaac  Newton.  But  after  devoting 
himself  for  many  years  to  purely  physical  research, 
Lodge  also,  as  he  has  confessed,  found  that  he  had 
overlooked  the  religious  side  of  life,  and  therefore  set 
himself  with  characteristic  energy  to  the  task  —  the 
stages  of  which  are  described  in  a  long  series  of  books 
- —  of  developing  this  atrophied  side  of  his  nature. 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


201 


Unlike  Newton,  who  was  worried  about  the  future, 
Lodge  became  worried  about  the  past.  Just  as  Newton 
found  what  he  was  contented  to  regard  as  religious 
peace  in  speculating  on  the  meaning  of  the  Books  of 
Daniel  and  Revelation,  so  Lodge  found  a  similar  satis¬ 
faction  in  speculations  concerning  the  origin  of  the 
soul  and  in  hunting  out  tags  from  the  poets  to  support 
his  speculations.  So  fascinating  was  this  occupation 
that  it  seemed  to  him  to  constitute  a  great  “ message’ * 
to  the  world.  ‘‘My  message  is  that  there  is  some  great 
truth  in  the  idea  of  preexistence,  not  an  obvious  truth, 
nor  one  easy  to  formulate  —  a  truth  difficult  to  ex¬ 
press  —  not  to  be  identified  with  the  guesses  of  rein¬ 
carnation  and  transmigration,  which  may  be  fanciful. 
We  may  not  have  been  individuals  before,  but  we  are 
chips  or  fragments  of  a  great  mass  of  mind,  of  spirit, 
and  of  life  —  drops,  as  it  were,  taken  out  of  a  germinal 
reservoir  of  life,  and  incubated  until  incarnate  in  a 
material  body.”  1  The  genuine  mystic  would  smile  if 
asked  to  accept  as  a  divine  message  these  phraseologi¬ 
cal  gropings  in  the  darkness,  with  their  culmination  in 
the  gospel  of  ‘‘incubated  drops.”  They  certainly  rep¬ 
resent  an  attempt  to  get  at  a  real  fact.  But  the  mystic 
is  not  troubled  by  speculations  about  the  origin  of  the 
individual,  or  theories  of  preexistence,  fantastic  myths 
which  belong  to  the  earlier  Plato's  stage  of  thought.  It 
is  abundantly  evident  that  when  the  hypertrophied 
man  of  science  seeks  to  cultivate  his  atrophied  religious 

1  Sir  Oliver  Lodge,  Reason  and  Belief ,  p.  19. 


202 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


instincts  it  is  with  the  utmost  difficulty  that  he  es¬ 
capes  from  science.  His  conversion  to  religion  merely 
means,  for  the  most  part,  that  he  has  exchanged 
sound  science  for  pseudo-science. 

Similarly,  when  the  man  with  hypertrophied  reli¬ 
gious  instincts  seeks  to  cultivate  his  atrophied  scienti¬ 
fic  instincts,  the  results  are  scarcely  satisfactory.  Here, 
indeed,  we  are  concerned  with  a  phenomenon  that  is 
rarer  than  the  reverse  process.  The  reason  may  not  be 
far  to  seek.  The  instinct  of  religion  develops  earlier  in 
the  history  of  a  race  than  the  instinct  of  science.  The 
man  who  has  found  the  massive  satisfaction  of  his 
religious  cravings  is  seldom  at  any  stage  conscious  of 
scientific  cravings;  he  is  apt  to  feel  that  he  already  pos¬ 
sesses  the  supreme  knowledge.  The  religious  doubters 
who  vaguely  feel  that  their  faith  is  at  variance  with 
science  are  merely  the  creatures  of  creeds,  the  product 
of  Churches;  they  are  not  the  genuine  mystics.  The 
genuine  mystics  who  have  exercised  their  scientific 
instincts  have  generally  found  scope  for  such  exercise 
within  an  enlarged  theological  scheme  which  they  re¬ 
garded  as  part  of  their  religion.  So  it  was  that  St.  Au¬ 
gustine  found  scope  for  his  full  and  vivid,  if  capricious, 
intellectual  impulses;  so  also  Aquinas,  in  whom  there 
was  doubtless  less  of  the  mystic  and  more  of  the  scien¬ 
tist,  found  scope  for  the  rational  and  orderly  develop¬ 
ment  of  a  keen  intelligence  which  has  made  him  an  au¬ 
thority  and  even  a  pioneer  for  many  who  are  absolutely 
indifferent  to  his  theology. 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION  203 

Again  we  see  that  to  understand  the  real  relations  of 
science  and  mysticism,  we  must  return  to  ages  when, 
on  neither  side,  had  any  accumulated  mass  of  dead 
traditions  effected  an  artificial  divorce  between  two 
great  natural  instincts.  It  has  already  been  pointed 
out  that  if  we  go  outside  civilisation  the  divorce  is  not 
found;  the  savage  mystic  is  also  the  savage  man  of 
science,  the  priest  and  the  doctor  are  one.1  It  is  so  also 
for  the  most  part  in  barbarism,  among  the  ancient  He¬ 
brews  for  instance,  and  not  only  among  their  priests, 
but  even  among  their  prophets.  It  appears  that  the 
most  usual  Hebrew  word  for  what  we  term  the  “  pro¬ 
phet”  signified  “one  who  bursts  forth,”  presumably 
into  the  utterance  of  spiritual  verities,  and  the  less  us¬ 
ual  words  signify  “seer.”  That  is  to  say,  the  prophet 
was  primarily  a  man  of  religion,  secondarily  a  man  of 
science.  And  that  predictive  element  in  the  prophet’s 
function,  which  to  persons  lacking  in  religious  instinct 
seems  the  whole  of  his  function,  has  no  relationship  at 
all  to  religion;  it  is  a  function  of  science.  It  is  an  in¬ 
sight  into  cause  and  effect,  a  conception  of  sequences 
based  on  extended  observation  and  enabling  the 

1  It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  point  out  that  a  differentiation  of  function 
has  to  be  made  sooner  or  later,  and  sometimes  it  is  made  soon.  This  wa3 
so  among  the  Todas  of  India.  “Certain  Todas,”  says  Dr.  Rivers 
{The  Todas,  1906,  p.  249),  “  have  the  power  of  divination,  others  are 
sorcerers,  and  others  again  have  the  power  of  curing  diseases  by  means 
of  spells  and  rites,  while  all  three  functions  are  quite  separate  from  those 
of  the  priest  or  sharman.  The  Todas  have  advanced  some  way  towards 
civilisation  of  function  in  this  respect,  and  have  as  separate  members  of 
the  community  their  prophets,  their  magicians,  and  their  medicine-men 
in  addition  to  their  priests." 


204 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


“  prophet ”  to  assert  that  certain  lines  of  action  will 
probably  lead  to  the  degeneration  of  a  stock,  or  to 
the  decay  of  a  nation.  It  is  a  sort  of  applied  history. 
“  Prophecy  ”  has  no  more  to  do  with  religion  than  have 
the  forecasts  of  the  Meteorological  Bureau,  which  also 
are  a  kind  of  applied  science  in  earlier  stages  associated 
with  religion. 

If,  keeping  within  the  sphere  of  civilisation,  we  go 
back  as  far  as  we  can,  the  conclusion  we  reach  is  not 
greatly  different.  The  earliest  of  the  great  mystics  in 
historical  times  is  Lao-tze.  He  lived  six  hundred  years 
earlier  than  Jesus,  a  hundred  years  earlier  than  Sakya- 
Muni,  and  he  was  more  quintessentially  a  mystic  than 
either.  He  was,  moreover,  incomparably  nearer  than 
either  to  the  point  of  view  of  science.  Even  his  occupa¬ 
tion  in  life  was,  in  relation  to  his  age  and  land,  of  a 
scientific  character;  he  was,  if  we  may  trust  uncertain 
tradition,  keeper  of  the  archives.  In  the  substance  of 
his  work  this  harmony  of  religion  and  science  is 
throughout  traceable,  the  very  word  “Tao,”  which  to 
Lao-tze  is  the  symbol  of  all  that  to  which  religion  may 
mystically  unite  us,  is  susceptible  of  being  translated 
“Reason,”  although  that  word  remains  inadequate  to 
its  full  meaning.  There  are  no  theological  or  metaphys¬ 
ical  speculations  here  concerning  God  (the  very  word 
only  occurs  once  and  may  be  a  later  interpolation),  the 
soul,  or  immortality.  The  delicate  and  profound  art  of 
Lao-tze  largely  lies  in  the  skill  with  which  he  expresses 
spiritual  verities  in  the  form  of  natural  truths.  His 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


205 

affirmations  not  only  go  to  the  core  of  religion,  but 
they  express  the  essential  methods  of  science.  This  man 
has  the  mystic’s  heart,  but  he  has  also  the  physicist’s 
touch  and  the  biologist’s  eye.  He  moves  in  a  sphere 
in  which  religion  and  science  are  one. 

If  we  pass  to  more  modern  times  and  the  little  Euro¬ 
pean  corner  of  the  world,  around  the  Mediterranean 
shores,  which  is  the  cradle  of  our  latter-day  civilisation, 
again  and  again  we  find  traces  of  this  fundamental 
unity  of  mysticism  and  science.  It  may  well  be  that 
we  never  again  find  it  in  quite  so  pure  a  form  as  in 
Lao-tze,  quite  so  free  from  all  admixture  alike  of  bad  re¬ 
ligion  and  bad  science.  The  exuberant  unbalanced  ac¬ 
tivity  of  our  race,  the  restless  acquisitiveness — already 
manifested  in  the  sphere  of  ideas  and  traditions  before 
it  led  to  the  production  of  millionaires  —  soon  became 
an  ever-growing  impediment  to  such  unity  of  spiritual 
impulses.  Among  the  supple  and  yet  ferocious  Greeks, 
indeed,  versatility  and  recklessness  seem  at  a  first 
glance  always  to  have  stood  in  the  way  of  approach  to 
the  essential  terms  of  this  problem.  It  was  only  when 
the  Greeks  began  to  absorb  Oriental  influences,  we  are 
inclined  to  say,  that  they  became  genuine  mystics,  and 
as  they  approached  mysticism  they  left  science  behind. 

Yet  there  was  a  vein  of  mysticism  in  the  Greeks  from 
the  first,  not  alone  due  to  seeds  from  the  East  flung  to 
germinate  fruitfully  in  Greek  soil,  though  perhaps  to 
that  Ionian  element  of  the  Near  East  which  was  an  es¬ 
sential  part  of  the  Greek  spirit.  All  that  Karl  Joel  of 


206 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


Basel  has  sought  to  work  out  concerning  the  evolution 
of  the  Greek  philosophic  spirit  has  a  bearing  on  this 
point.  We  are  wrong,  he  believes,  to  look  on  the  early 
Greek  philosophers  of  Nature  as  mainly  physicists, 
treating  the  religious  and  poetic  mystic  elements  in 
them  as  mere  archaisms,  concessions,  or  contradic¬ 
tions.  Hellas  needed,  and  possessed,  an  early  Romantic 
spirit,  if  we  understand  the  Romantic  spirit,  not 
merely  through  its  reactionary  offshoots,  but  as  a  deep 
mystico-lyrical  expression;  it  was  comparable  in  early 
Greece  to  the  Romantic  spirit  of  the  great  creative 
men  of  the  early  Renaissance  or  the  early  nineteenth 
century,  and  the  Apollinian  classic  spirit  was  devel¬ 
oped  out  of  an  ordered  discipline  and  formulation  of 
the  Dionysian  spirit  more  mystically  near  to  Nature.1 
If  we  bear  this  in  mind  we  are  helped  to  understand 
much  in  the  religious  life  of  Greece  which  seems  not  to 
harmonise  with  what  we  conventionally  call  “classic.” 

In  the  dim  figure  of  Pythagoras  we  perhaps  see  not 
only  a  great  leader  of  physical  science,  but  also  a  great 
initiator  in  spiritual  mystery.  It  is,  at  any  rate,  fairly 
clear  that  he  established  religious  brotherhoods  of  care¬ 
fully  selected  candidates,  women  as  well  as  men  being 
eligible,  and  living  on  so  lofty  and  aristocratic  a  level 
that  the  populace  of  Magna  Grecia,  who  could  not 
understand  them,  decided  out  of  resentment  to  burn 

1  Joel,  Ur  sprung  der  Natur  philo  sophie  aus  dem  Geiste  der  Romantik 
(1903);  Nietzsche  und  die  Romantik  (1905).  But  I  am  here  quoting  from 
Professor  Joel’s  account  of  his  own  philosophical  development  in  Du 
DexUsciie  Philosophic  der  Gegenwart,  vol.  1  (1921). 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION  207 

them  alive,  and  the  whole  order  was  annihilated  about 
B.c.  500.  But  exactly  how  far  these  early  Pythago¬ 
reans,  whose  community  has  been  compared  to  the  me^ 
diaeval  orders  of  chivalry,  were  mystics,  we  may  imagine 
as  we  list,  in  the  light  of  the  Pythagorean  echoes  we 
find  here  and  there  in  Plato.  On  the  whole  we  scarcely 
go  to  the  Greeks  for  a  clear  exposition  of  what  we  now 
term  “  mysticism.”  We  see  more  of  it  in  Lucretius  than 
we  can  divine  in  his  master  Epicurus.  And  we  see  it 
still  more  clearly  in  the  Stoics.  We  can,  indeed,  no¬ 
where  find  a  more  pure  and  concise  statement  than  in 
Marcus  Aurelius  of  the  mystical  core  of  religion  as  the 
union  in  love  and  harmony  and  devotion  of  the  self  with 
the  Not-Self. 

If  Lucretius  may  be  accounted  the  first  of  moderns 
in  the  identification  of  mysticism  and  science,  he  has 
been  followed  by  many,  even  though,  one  sometimes 
thinks,  with  an  ever-increasing  difficulty,  a  drooping  of 
the  wings  of  mystical  aspiration,  a  limping  of  the  feet 
of  scientific  progress.  Leonardo  and  Giordano  Bruno 
and  Spinoza  and  Goethe,  each  with  a  little  imperfec¬ 
tion  on  one  side  or  the  other,  if  not  on  both  sides,  have 
moved  in  a  sphere  in  which  the  impulses  of  religion  are 
felt  to  spring  from  the  same  centre  as  the  impulses  of 
science.  Einstein,  whose  attitude  in  many  ways  is  so  in¬ 
teresting,  closely  associates  the  longing  for  pure  knowl¬ 
edge  with  religious  feeling,  and  he  has  remarked  that 
“in  every  true  searcher  of  Nature  there  is  a  kind  of  re¬ 
ligious  reverence.”  He  is  inclined  to  attach  significance 


208 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


to  the  fact  that  so  many  great  men  of  science  —  New¬ 
ton,  Descartes,  Gauss,  Helmholtz  —  have  been  in  one 
way  or  another  religious.  If  we  cannot  altogether  in¬ 
clude  such  men  as  Swedenborg  and  Faraday  in  the 
same  group,  it  is  because  we  cannot  feel  that  in  them 
the  two  impulses,  however  highly  developed,  really 
spring  from  the  same  centre  or  really  make  a  true  har¬ 
mony.  We  suspect  that  these  men  and  their  like  kept 
their  mysticism  in  a  science-proof  compartment  of  their 
minds,  and  their  science  in  a  mysticism-proof  compart¬ 
ment;  we  tremble  for  the  explosive  result,  should  the 
wall  of  partition  ever  be  broken  down. 

The  difficulty,  we  see  again,  has  been  that,  on  each 
hand,  there  has  been  a  growth  of  non-essential  tradi¬ 
tions  around  the  pure  and  vital  impulse,  and  the  obvi¬ 
ous  disharmony  of  these  two  sets  of  accretions  conceals 
the  underlying  harmony  of  the  impulses  themselves. 
The  possibility  of  reaching  the  natural  harmony  is  thus 
not  necessarily  by  virtue  of  any  rare  degree  of  intellec¬ 
tual  attainment,  nor  by  any  rare  gift  of  inborn  spiritual 
temperament,  —  though  either  of  these  may  in  some 
cases  be  operative,  —  but  rather  by  the  happy  chance 
that  the  burden  of  tradition  on  each  side  has  fallen  and 
that  the  mystical  impulse  is  free  to  play  without  a  dead 
metaphysical  theology,  the  scientific  impulse  without  a 
dead  metaphysical  formalism.  It  is  a  happy  chance 
that  may  befall  the  simple  more  easily  than  the  wise 
and  learnedL 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


209 


in 

The  foregoing  considerations  have  perhaps  cleared  the 
way  to  a  realisation  that  when  we  look  broadly  at  the 
matter,  when  we  clear  away  all  the  accumulated  super¬ 
stitions,  the  unreasoned  prepossessions,  on  either  side, 
and  so  reach  firm  ground,  not  only  is  there  no  opposi¬ 
tion  between  science  and  mysticism,  but  in  their  es¬ 
sence,  and  at  the  outset,  they  are  closely  related.  The 
seeming  divorce  between  them  is  due  to  a  false  and  un¬ 
balanced  development  on  either  side,  if  not  on  both 
sides. 

Yet  all  such  considerations  cannot  suffice  to  make 
present  to  us  this  unity  of  apparent  opposites.  There 
is,  indeed,  it  has  often  seemed  to  me,  a  certain  futility 
in  all  discussion  of  the  relative  claims  of  science  and 
religion.  This  is  a  matter  which,  in  the  last  resort,  lies 
beyond  the  sphere  of  argument.  It  depends  not  only  on 
a  man’s  entire  psychic  equipment,  brought  with  him  at 
birth  and  never  to  be  fundamentally  changed,  but  it 
is  the  outcome  of  his  own  intimate  experience  during 
life.  It  cannot  be  profitably  discussed  because  it  is  ex¬ 
periential. 

It  seems  to  me,  therefore,  that,  having  gone  so  far, 
and  stated  what  I  consider  to  be  the  relations  of  mysti¬ 
cism  and  science  as  revealed  in  human  history,  I  am 
bound  to  go  further  and  to  state  my  personal  grounds 
for  believing  that  the  harmonious  satisfaction  alike  of 
the  religious  impulse  and  the  scientific  impulse  may  be 


210 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


attained  to-day  by  an  ordinarily  balanced  person  in 
whom  both  impulses  crave  for  satisfaction.  There  is, 
indeed,  a  serious  difficulty.  To  set  forth  a  personal  re¬ 
ligious  experience  for  the  first  time  requires  consider¬ 
able  resolution,  and  not  least  to  one  who  is  inclined  to 
suspect  that  the  experiences  usually  so  set  forth  can  be 
of  no  profound  or  significant  nature;  that  if  the  under¬ 
lying  motives  of  a  man’s  life  can  be  brought  to  the  sur¬ 
face  and  put  into  words  their  vital  motive  power  is 
gone.  Even  the  fact  that  more  than  forty  years  have 
passed  since  the  experience  took  place  scarcely  suffices 
to  make  the  confession  of  it  easy.  But  I  recall  to  mind 
that  the  first  original  book  I  ever  planned  (and  in  fact 
began  to  write)  was  a  book,  impersonal  though  sug¬ 
gested  by  personal  experience,  on  the  foundations  of  re¬ 
ligion.1  I  put  it  aside,  saying  to  myself  I  would  com¬ 
plete  it  in  old  age,  because  it  seemed  to  me  that  the 
problem  of  religion  will  always  be  fresh,  while  there 
were  other  problems  more  pressingly  in  need  of  speedy 
investigation.  Now,  it  may  be,  I  begin  to  feel  the  time 
has  come  to  carry  that  early  project  a  stage  further. 

Like  many  of  the  generation  to  which  I  belonged,  f 
was  brought  up  far  from  the  Sunday-school  atmosphere 
of  conventional  religiosity.  I  received  little  religious 
instruction  outside  the  home,  but  there  I  was  made  to 
feel,  from  my  earliest  years,  that  religion  is  a  very  vital 

1  In  connection  with  this  scheme,  it  may  be  interesting  to  note,  I  pre¬ 
pared,  in  1879,  a  questionnaire  on  “conversion,”  on  the  lines  of  the  inves¬ 
tigations  which  some  years  later  began  to  be  so  fruitfully  carried  out  by 
the  psychologists  of  religion  in  America. 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


211 


and  personal  matter  with  which  the  world  and  the  fash¬ 
ion  of  it  had  nothing  to  do.  To  that  teaching,  while  still 
scarcely  more  than  a  child,  I  responded  in  a  whole¬ 
hearted  way.  Necessarily  the  exercise  of  this  early  im¬ 
pulse  followed  the  paths  prescribed  for  it  by  my  en¬ 
vironment.  I  accepted  the  creed  set  before  me ;  I  pri¬ 
vately  studied  the  New  Testament  for  my  own  satisfac¬ 
tion;  I  honestly  endeavoured,  strictly  in  private,  to 
mould  my  actions  and  impulses  on  what  seemed  to  be 
Christian  lines.  There  was  no  obtrusive  outward  evi¬ 
dence  of  this;  outside  the  home,  moreover,  I  moved  in  a 
world  which  might  be  indifferent  but  was  not  actively 
hostile  to  my  inner  aspirations,  and,  if  the  need  for  any 
external  affirmation  had  become  inevitable,  I  should,  I 
am  certain,  have  invoked  other  than  religious  grounds 
for  my  protest.  Religion,  as  I  instinctively  felt  then 
and  as  I  consciously  believe  now,  is  a  private  matter,  as 
love  is.  This  was  my  mental  state  at  the  age  of  twelve. 

Then  came  the  period  of  emotional  and  intellectual 
expansion,  when  the  scientific  and  critical  instincts  be¬ 
gan  to  germinate.  These  were  completely  spontaneous 
and  not  stimulated  by  any  influences  of  the  environ¬ 
ment.  To  inquire,  to  question,  to  investigate  the  qual¬ 
ities  of  the  things  around  us  and  to  search  out  their 
causes,  is  as  native  an  impulse  as  the  religious  impulse 
would  be  found  to  be  if  only  we  would  refrain  from  ex¬ 
citing  it  artificially.  In  the  first  place,  this  scientific 
impulse  was  not  greatly  concerned  with  the  traditional 
body  of  beliefs  which  were  then  inextricably  entwined 


212 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


in  my  mind  with  the  exercise  of  the  religious  instinct. 
In  so  far,  indeed,  as  it  touched  them  it  took  up  their  de¬ 
fence.  Thus  I  read  Renan’s  “Life  of  Jesus,”  and  the 
facile  sentiment  of  this  book,  the  attitude  of  artistic  re¬ 
construction,  aroused  a  criticism  which  led  me  to  over¬ 
look  any  underlying  sounder  qualities.  Yet  all  the  time 
the  inquiring  and  critical  impulse  was  a  slowly  permeat¬ 
ing  and  invading  influence,  and  its  application  to 
religion  was  from  time  to  time  stimulated  by  books, 
although  such  application  was  in  no  slightest  degree 
favoured  by  the  social  environment.  When,  too,  at  the 
age  of  fifteen,  I  came  to  read  Swinburne’s  “Songs  be¬ 
fore  Sunrise,”  —  although  the  book  made  no  very  per¬ 
sonal  appeal  to  me,  —  I  realised  that  it  was  possible  to 
present  in  an  attractively  modern  emotional  light  reli¬ 
gious  beliefs  which  were  incompatible  with  Christian¬ 
ity,  and  even  actively  hostile  to  its  creed.  The  process  of 
disintegration  took  place  in  slow  stages  that  were  not 
perceived  until  the  process  was  complete.  Then  at  last  I 
realised  that  I  no  longer  possessed  any  religious  faith. 
All  the  Christian  dogmas  I  had  been  brought  up  to  ac¬ 
cept  unquestioned  had  slipped  away,  and  they  had 
dragged  with  them  what  I  had  experienced  of  religion, 
for  I  could  not  then  so  far  analyse  all  that  is  roughly 
lumped  together  as  “religion”  as  to  disentangle  the 
essential  from  the  accidental.  Such  analysis,  to  be 
effectively  convincing,  demanded  personal  experiences 
I  was  not  possessed  of. 

I  was  now  seventeen  years  of  age.  The  loss  of  reli- 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION  213 

gious  faith  had  produced  no  change  in  conduct,  save 
that  religious  observances,  which  had  never  been  os¬ 
tentatiously  performed,  were  dropped,  so  far  as  they 
might  be  without  hurting  the  feelings  of  others.  The 
revolution  was  so  gradual  and  so  natural  that  even  in¬ 
wardly  the  shock  was  not  great,  while  various  activities, 
the  growth  of  mental  aptitudes,  sufficiently  served  to 
occupy  the  mind.  It  was  only  during  periods  of  depres¬ 
sion  that  the  absence  of  faith  as  a  satisfaction  of  the  re¬ 
ligious  impulse  became  at  all  acutely  felt.  Possibly  it 
might  have  been  felt  less  acutely  if  I  could  have  real¬ 
ised  that  there  was  even  a  real  benefit  in  the  cutting 
down  and  clearing  away  of  traditional  and  non-vital 
beliefs.  Not  only  was  it  a  wholesome  and  strenuous  ef¬ 
fort  to  obey  at  all  costs  the  call  of  what  was  felt  as 
“truth/’  and  therefore  having  in  it  a  spirit  of  religion 
even  though  directed  against  religion,  but  it  was  evi¬ 
dently  favourable  to  the  training  of  intelligence.  The 
man  who  has  never  wrestled  with  his  early  faith,  the 
faith  that  he  was  brought  up  with  and  that  yet  is  not 
truly  his  own,  —  for  no  faith  is  our  own  that  we  have 
not  arduously  won,  —  has  missed  not  only  a  moral  but 
an  intellectual  discipline.  The  absence  of  that  disci¬ 
pline  may  mark  a  man  for  life  and  render  all  his  work  in 
the  world  ineffective.  He  has  missed  a  training  in  criti¬ 
cism,  in  analysis,  in  open-mindedness,  in  the  resolutely 
impersonal  treatment  of  personal  problems,  which  no 
other  training  can  compensate.  He  is,  for  the  most 
part,  condemned  to  live  in  a  mental  jungle  where  his 


214 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


arm  will  soon  be  too  feeble  to  clear  away  the  growths 
that  enclose  him  and  his  eyes  too  weak  to  find  the 
light. 

While,  however,  I  had  adopted,  without  knowing  it, 
the  best  course  to  steel  the  power  of  thinking  and  to 
render  possible  a  patient,  humble,  self-forgetful  atti¬ 
tude  towards  Nature,  there  were  times  when  I  became 
painfully,  almost  despairingly,  conscious  of  the  unsat¬ 
isfied  cravings  of  the  religious  impulse.  These  moods 
were  emphasised  even  by  the  books  I  read  which  ar¬ 
gued  that  religion,  in  the  only  sense  in  which  I  under¬ 
stood  religion,  was  unnecessary,  and  that  science, 
whether  or  not  formulated  into  a  creed,  furnished  all 
that  we  need  to  ask  in  this  direction.  I  well  remember 
the  painful  feelings  with  which  I  read  at  this  time  D.  F. 
Strauss’s  “The  Old  Faith  and  the  New.”  It  is  a  scien¬ 
tific  creed  set  down  in  old  age,  with  much  comfortable 
complacency,  by  a  man  who  found  considerable  satis¬ 
faction  in  the  evening  of  life  in  the  enjoyment  of 
Haydn’s  quartets  and  Munich  brown  beer.  They  are 
both  excellent  things,  as  I  am  now  willing  to  grant,  but 
they  are  a  sorry  source  of  inspiration  when  one  is  seven¬ 
teen  and  consumed  by  a  thirst  for  impossibly  remote 
ideals.  Moreover,  the  philosophic  horizon  of  this  man 
was  as  limited  and  as  prosaic  as  the  aesthetic  atmos¬ 
phere  in  which  he  lived.  I  had  to  acknowledge  to  my¬ 
self  that  the  scientific  principles  of  the  universe  as 
Strauss  laid  them  down  presented,  so  far  as  I  knew,  the 
utmost  scope  in  which  the  human  spirit  could  move. 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


215 


But  what  a  poor  scope !  I  knew  nothing  of  the  way 
that  Nietzsche,  about  that  time,  had  demolished  Strauss. 
But  I  had  the  feeling  that  the  universe  was  represented 
as  a  sort  of  factory  filled  by  an  inextricable  web  of 
wheels  and  looms  and  flying  shuttles,  in  a  deafening 
din.  That,  it  seemed,  was  the  world  as  the  most  com¬ 
petent  scientific  authorities  declared  it  to  be  made.  It 
was  a  world  I  was  prepared  to  accept,  and  yet  a  world 
in  which,  I  felt,  I  could  only  wander  restlessly,  an  igno¬ 
rant  and  homeless  child.  Sometimes,  no  doubt,  there 
were  other  visions  of  the  universe  a  little  less  disheart¬ 
ening,  such  as  that  presented  by  Herbert  Spencer’s 
u  First  Principles.”  But  the  dominant  feeling  always 
was  that  while  the  scientific  outlook,  by  which  I  mainly 
meant  the  outlook  of  Darwin  and  Huxley,  commended 
itself  to  me  as  presenting  a  sound  view  of  the  world,  on 
the  emotional  side  I  was  a  stranger  to  that  world,  if, 
indeed,  I  would  not,  with  Omar,  “shatter  it  to  bits.” 

At  the  same  time,  it  must  be  noted,  there  was  no 
fault  to  find  with  the  general  trend  of  my  life  and  activ¬ 
ities.  I  was  fully  occupied,  with  daily  duties  as  well  as 
with  the  actively  interested  contemplation  of  an  ever- 
enlarging  intellectual  horizon.  This  was  very  notably 
the  case  at  the  age  of  nineteen,  three  years  after  all 
vestiges  of  religious  faith  had  disappeared  from  the 
psychic  surface. 

I  was  still  interested  in  religious  and  philosophic 
questions,  and  it  so  chanced  that  at  this  time  I  read 
the  “Life  in  Nature”  of  James  Hinton,  who  had  al- 


216 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


ready  attracted  my  attention  as  a  genuine  man  of  sci¬ 
ence  with  yet  an  original  and  personal  grasp  of  religion. 
I  had  read  the  book  six  months  before  and  it  had  not 
greatly  impressed  me.  Now,  I  no  longer  know  why,  I 
read  it  again,  and  the  effect  was  very  different.  Evi¬ 
dently  by  this  time  my  mind  had  reached  a  stage  of 
saturated  solution  which  needed  but  the  shock  of  the 
right  contact  to  recrystallise  in  forms  that  were  a  reve¬ 
lation  to  me.  Here  evidently  the  right  contact  was  ap¬ 
plied.  Hinton  in  this  book  showed  himself  a  scientific 
biologist  who  carried  the  mechanistic  explanation  of 
life  even  further  than  was  then  usual.1  But  he  was  a 
man  of  highly  passionate  type  of  intellect,  and  what 
might  otherwise  be  formal  and  abstract  was  for  him 
soaked  in  emotion.  Thus,  while  he  saw  the  world  as  an 
orderly  mechanism,  he  was  not  content,  like  Strauss,  to 
stop  there  and  see  in  it  nothing  else.  As  he  viewed  it, 
the  mechanism  was  not  the  mechanism  of  a  factory,  it 
was  vital,  with  all  the  glow  and  warmth  and  beauty  of 
life;  it  was,  therefore,  something  which  not  only  the  in¬ 
tellect  might  accept,  but  the  heart  might  cling  to.  The 

1  It  must  be  remembered  that  for  science  the  mechanistic  assumption 
always  remains;  it  is,  as  Vaihinger  would  say,  a  necessary  fiction.  To 
abandon  it  is  to  abandon  science.  Driesch,  the  most  prominent  vitalist 
of  our  time,  has  realised  this,  and  in  his  account  of  his  own  mental  devel¬ 
opment  (Die  Deutsche  Philosophie  der  Gegenwart,  vol.  I,  1921)  he  shows 
how,  beginning  as  a  pupil  of  Haeckel  and  working  at  zoology  for  many 
years,  after  adopting  the  theory  of  vitalism  he  abandoned  all  zoological 
work  and  became  a  professor  of  philosophy.  When  the  religious  spec¬ 
tator,  or  the  aesthetic  spectator  (as  is  well  illustrated  in  the  French  re¬ 
view  L' Esprit  Nouveau),  sees  the  “machinery”  as  something  else  than 
machinery  he  is  legitimately  going  outside  the  sphere  of  science,  but  he 
is  not  thereby  destroying  the  basic  assumption  of  science. 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


217 


bearing  of  this  conception  on  my  state  of  mind  is  obvi¬ 
ous.  It  acted  with  the  swiftness  of  an  electric  contact; 
the  dull  aching  tension  was  removed ;  the  two  opposing 
psychic  tendencies  were  fused  in  delicious  harmony, 
and  my  whole  attitude  towards  the  universe  was 
changed.  It  was  no  longer  an  attitude  of  hostility  and 
dread,  but  of  confidence  and  love.  My  self  was  one 
with  the  Not-Self,  my  will  one  with  the  universal  will. 
I  seemed  to  walk  in  light;  my  feet  scarcely  touched 
the  ground;  I  had  entered  a  new  world. 

The  effect  of  that  swift  revolution  was  permanent. 
At  first  there  was  a  moment  or  two  of  wavering,  and 
then  the  primary  exaltation  subsided  into  an  attitude 
of  calm  serenity  towards  all  those  questions  that  had 
once  seemed  so  torturing.  In  regard  to  all  these  mat¬ 
ters  I  had  become  permanently  satisfied  and  at  rest, 
yet  absolutely  unfettered  and  free.  I  was  not  troubled 
about  the  origin  of  the  “soul”  or  about  its  destiny;  I 
was  entirely  prepared  to  accept  any  analysis  of  the 
“soul”  which  might  commend  itself  as  reasonable. 
Neither  was  I  troubled  about  the  existence  of  any  su¬ 
perior  being  or  beings,  and  I  was  ready  to  see  that  all 
the  words  and  forms  by  which  men  try  to  picture  spir¬ 
itual  realities  are  mere  metaphors  and  images  of  an 
inward  experience.  There  was  not  a  single  clause  in 
my  religious  creed  because  I  held  no  creed.  I  had  found 
that  dogmas  were  —  not,  as  I  had  once  imagined,  true, 
not,  as  I  had  afterwards  supposed,  false,  —  but  the  mere 
empty  shadows  of  intimate  personal  experience.  I  had 


218  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

become  indifferent  to  shadows,  for  I  held  the  substance. 
I  had  sacrificed  what  I  held  dearest  at  the  call  of  what 
seemed  to  be  Truth,  and  now  I  was  repaid  a  thousand¬ 
fold.  Henceforth  I  could  face  life  with  confidence  and 
joy,  for  my  heart  was  at  one  with  the  world  and  what¬ 
ever  might  prove  to  be  in  harmony  with  the  world 
could  not  be  out  of  harmony  with  me.1 

Thus,  it  might  seem  to  many,  nothing  whatever  had 
happened;  I  had  not  gained  one  single  definite  belief 
that  could  be  expressed  in  a  scientific  formula  or  hard¬ 
ened  into  a  religious  creed.  That,  indeed,  is  the  essence 
of  such  a  process.  A  “conversion  ”  is  not,  as  is  often  as¬ 
sumed,  a  turning  towards  a  belief.  More  strictly,  it  is 
a  turning  round,  a  revolution;  it  has  no  primary  refer¬ 
ence  to  any  external  object.  As  the  greater  mystics 
have  often  understood,  “the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is 
within.”  To  put  the  matter  a  little  more  precisely,  the 
change  is  fundamentally  a  readjustment  of  psychic  ele¬ 
ments  to  each  other,  enabling  the  whole  machine  to 
work  harmoniously.  There  is  no  necessary  introduc¬ 
tion  of  new  ideas;  there  is  much  more  likely  to  be  a 
casting  out  of  dead  ideas  which  have  clogged  the  vital 
process.  The  psychic  organism  —  which  in  conven- 

1  Long  ago  Edith  Simcox  (in  a  passage  of  her  Natural  Law  which 
chanced  to  strike  my  attention  very  soon  after  the  episode  above  nar¬ 
rated)  well  described  “conversion”  as  a  “spiritual  revolution,”  not 
based  on  any  single  rational  consideration,  but  due  to  the  “cumulative 
evidence  of  cognate  impressions”  resulting,  at  a  particular  moment,  not 
in  a  change  of  belief,  but  in  a  total  rearrangement  and  recolouring  of 
beliefs  and  impressions,  with  the  supreme  result  that  the  order  of  the 
universe  is  apprehended  no  longer  as  hostile,  but  as  friendly.  This  is  the 
fundamental  fact  of  “conversion,”  which  is  the  gate  of  mysticism. 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


2ig 

tional  religion  is  called  the  “sour”  —  had  not  been  in 
harmony  with  itself;  now  it  is  revolving  truly  on  its 
own  axis,  and  in  doing  so  it  simultaneously  finds  its 
true  orbit  in  the  cosmic  system.  In  becoming  one  with 
itself,  it  becomes  one  with  the  universe.1 

The  process,  it  will  be  seen,  is  thus  really  rather  an¬ 
alogous  to  that  which  on  the  physical  plane  takes  place 
in  a  person  whose  jaw  or  arm  is  dislocated,  whether  by 
some  inordinate  effort  or  some  sudden  shock  with  the 
external  world.  The  miserable  man  with  a  dislocated 
jaw  is  out  of  harmony  with  himself  and  with  the  uni¬ 
verse.  All  his  efforts  cannot  reduce  the  dislocation,  nor 
can  his  friends  help  him;  he  may  even  come  to  think 
there  is  no  cure.  But  a  surgeon  comes  along,  and  with  a 

1  How  we  are  to  analyse  the  conception  of  “universe”  —  apart  from 
its  personal  emotional  tone,  which  is  what  mainly  concerns  us  —  is,  of 
course,  a  matter  that  must  be  left  altogether  open  and  free.  Sir  James 
Frazer  at  the  end  of  his  Golden  Bough  (“Balder  the  Beautiful,”  vol.  n, 
p.  306)  finds  that  the  “universe”  is  an  “ever-shifting  phantasmagoria  of 
thought,”  or,  he  adds,  suddenly  shifting  to  a  less  idealistic  and  more 
realistic  standpoint,  “shadows  on  the  screen.”  That  is  a  literary  artist’s 
metaphysical  way  of  describing  the  matter  and  could  not  occur  to  any 
one  who  was  not  familiar  with  the  magic  lantern  which  has  now  devel¬ 
oped  into  the  cinema,  beloved  of  philosophers  for  its  symbolic  signifi¬ 
cance.  Mr.  Bertrand  Russell,  a  more  abstract  artist,  who  would  reject 
any  such  “imaginative  admixture”  as  he  would  find  in  Frazer’s  view, 
once  severely  refused  to  recognise  any  such  thing  as  a  “universe,”  but 
has  since  less  austerely  admitted  that  there  is,  after  all,  a  “set  of  appear¬ 
ances,”  which  may  fairly  be  labelled  “reality,”  so  long  as  we  do  not 
assume  “a  mysterious  Thing-in-Itself  behind  the  appearances.”  ( Na¬ 
tion ,  6th  January,  1923.)  But  there  are  always  some  people  who  think 
that  an  “appearance”  must  be  an  appearance  of  Something,  and  that 
when  a  “shadow”  is  cast  on  the  screen  of  our  sensory  apparatus  it  must 
be  cast  by  Something.  So  every  one  defines  the  “universe”  in  his  own 
way,  and  no  two  people  —  not  even  the  same  person  long  —  can  define 
it  in  the  same  way.  We  have  to  recognise  that  even  the  humblest  of  ua 
is  entitled  to  his  own  “universe.” 


220 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


slight  pressure  of  his  two  thumbs,  applied  at  the  right 
spot,  downwards  and  backwards,  the  jaw  springs  into 
place,  the  man  is  restored  to  harmony  —  and  the  uni¬ 
verse  is  transformed.  If  he  is  ignorant  enough,  he  will 
be  ready  to  fall  on  his  knees  before  his  deliverer  as  a  di¬ 
vine  being.  We  are  concerned  with  what  is  called  a 
“spiritual”  process,  —  for  it  is  an  accepted  and  neces¬ 
sary  convention  to  distinguish  between  the  “spiritual” 
and  the  “physical,”  —  but  this  crude  and  imperfect 
analogy  may  help  some  minds  to  understand  what  is 
meant. 

Thus  may  be  explained  what  may  seem  to  some  the 
curious  fact  that  I  never  for  a  moment  thought  of 
accepting  as  a  gospel  the  book  which  had  brought  me 
a  stimulus  of  such  inestimable  value.  The  person  in 
whom  “conversion”  takes  place  is  too  often  told  that 
the  process  is  connected  in  some  magical  manner  with  a 
supernatural  influence  of  some  kind,  a  book,  a  creed,  a 
church,  or  what  not.  I  had  read  this  book  before  and  it 
had  left  me  unmoved ;  I  knew  that  the  book  was  merely 
the  surgeon’s  touch,  that  the  change  had  its  source  in 
me  and  not  in  the  book.  I  never  looked  into  the  book 
again ;  I  cannot  tell  where  or  how  my  copy  of  it  disap¬ 
peared;  for  all  that  I  know,  having  accomplished  its 
mission,  it  was  drawn  up  again  to  Heaven  in  a  sheet. 
As  regards  James  Hinton,  I  was  interested  in  him  be¬ 
fore  the  date  of  the  episode  here  narrated ;  I  am  inter¬ 
ested  in  him  still.1 

1  The  simple  and  essential  outlines  of  “conversion”  have  been  ob« 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


221 


It  may  further  be  noted  that  this  process  of  “  con¬ 
version  ”  cannot  be  regarded  as  the  outcome  of  despair 
or  as  a  protective  regression  towards  childhood.  The 
unfortunate  individual,  we  sometimes  imagine,  who  is 
bereft  of  religious  faith  sinks  deeper  and  deeper  into 
despondency,  until  finally  he  unconsciously  seeks  the 
relief  of  his  woes  by  plunging  into  an  abyss  of  emo¬ 
tions,  thereby  committing  intellectual  suicide.  On  the 
contrary,  the  period  in  which  this  event  occurred  was 
not  a  period  of  dejection  either  mental  or  physical.  I 
was  fully  occupied ;  I  lived  a  healthy,  open-air  life,  in  a 
fine  climate,  amid  beautiful  scenery;  I  was  revelling 

scured  because  chiefly  studied  in  the  Churches  among  people  whose  pre¬ 
possessions  and  superstitions  have  rendered  it  a  highly  complex  process, 
and  mixed  up  with  questions  of  right  and  wrong  living  which,  important 
as  they  are,  properly  form  no  part  of  religion.  The  man  who  wraits  to  lead 
a  decent  life  until  he  has  “saved  his  soul”  is  not  likely  to  possess  a  soul 
that  is  worth  saving.  How  much  ignorance  prevails  in  regard  to  “con¬ 
version,”  even  among  the  leaders  of  religious  opinion,  and  what  violent 
contrasts  of  opinion  —  in  which  sometimes  both  the  opposing  parties  are 
mistaken  —  was  well  illustrated  by  a  discussion  on  the  subject  at  the 
Church  Congress  at  Sheffield  in  1922.  A  distinguished  Churchman  well 
defined  “conversion”  as  a  unification  of  character,  involving  the  whole 
man,  —  will,  intellect,  and  emotion,  —  by  which  a  “new  self”  was 
achieved;  but  he  also  thought  that  this  great  revolutionary  process  con¬ 
sisted  usually  in  giving  up  some  “definite  bad  habit,”  very  much  doubted 
whether  sudden  conversion  was  a  normal  phenomenon  at  all,  and  made 
no  attempt  to  distinguish  between  that  kind  of  “conversion”  which  is 
merely  the'result  of  suggestion  and  auto-suggestion,  after  a  kind  of  hys¬ 
terical  attack  produced  by  feverish  emotional  appeals,  and  that  which 
is  spontaneous  and  of  lifelong  effect.  Another  speaker  went  to  the  op¬ 
posite  extreme  by  asserting  that  “conversion  ”  is  an  absolutely  necessary 
process,  and  an  Archbishop  finally  swept  away  “conversion”  altogether 
by  declaring  that  the  whole  of  the  religious  life  (and  the  whole  of  the 
irreligious  life?)  is  a  process  of  conversion.  (The  Times,  12th  October, 
1922.)  It  may  be  a  satisfaction  to  some  to  realise  that,  this  is  a  matter 
on  which  it  is  vain  to  go  to  the  Churches  for  light. 


222 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


in  new  studies  and  the  growing  consciousness  of  new 
powers.  Instead  of  being  the  ultimate  stage  in  a  proc¬ 
ess  of  descent,  or  a  return  to  childhood,  such  psychic 
revolution  may  much  more  fittingly  be  regarded  as  the 
climax  of  an  ascensional  movement.  It  is  the  final 
casting  off  of  childish  things,  the  initiation  into  com¬ 
plete  manhood. 

There  is  nothing  ascetic  in  such  a  process.  One  is 
sometimes  tempted  to  think  that  to  approve  mysti¬ 
cism  is  to  preach  asceticism.  Certainly  many  mystics 
have  been  ascetic.  But  that  has  been  the  accident  of 
their  philosophy,  and  not  the  essence  of  their  religion. 
Asceticism  has,  indeed,  nothing  to  do  with  normal 
religion.  It  is,  at  the  best,  the  outcome  of  a  set  of 
philosophical  dogmas  concerning  the  relationship  of 
the  body  to  the  soul  and  the  existence  of  a  transcen¬ 
dental  spiritual  world.  That  is  philosophy,  of  a  sort,  not 
religion.  Plotinus,  who  has  been  so  immensely  influ¬ 
ential  in  our  Western  world  because  he  was  the  main 
channel  by  which  Greek  spiritual  tendencies  reached 
us,  to  become  later  embodied  in  Christianity,  is  usually 
regarded  as  a  typical  mystic,  though  he  was  primarily 
a  philosopher,  and  he  was  inclined  to  be  ascetic. 
Therein  we  may  not  consider  him  typically  Greek, 
but  the  early  philosophical  doctrine  of  Plato  concern¬ 
ing  the  transcendental  world  of  ‘‘Ideas"  easily  lent 
itself  to  developments  favourable  to  an  ascetic  life. 
Plotinus,  indeed,  was  not  disposed  to  any  extreme 
ascetic  position.  The  purification  of  the  soul  meant 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


223 

for  him  “to  detach  it  from  the  body,  and  to  elevate  it 
to  a  spiritual  world.”  But  he  would  not  have  sym¬ 
pathised  with  the  harsh  dualism  of  flesh  and  spirit 
which  often  flourished  among  Christian  ascetics.  He 
lived  celibate,  but  he  was  willing  to  regard  sex  desire  as 
beautiful,  though  a  delusion.1  When  we  put  aside  the 
philosophic  doctrines  with  which  it  may  be  associated, 
it  is  seen  that  asceticism  is  merely  an  adjuvant  dis¬ 
cipline  to  what  we  must  regard  as  pathological  forms 
of  mysticism. 

People  who  come  in  contact  with  the  phenomenon 
of  “conversion”  are  obsessed  by  the  notion  that  it 
must  have  something  to  do  with  morality.  They  seem 
to  fancy  that  it  is  something  that  happens  to  a  person 
leading  a  bad  life  whereby  he  suddenly  leads  a  good 
life.  That  is  a  delusion.  Whatever  virtue  morality 
may  possess,  it  is  outside  the  mystic’s  sphere.  No 
doubt  a  person  who  has  been  initiated  into  this  mys¬ 
tery  is  likely  to  be  moral  because  he  is  henceforth  in 
harmony  with  himself,  and  such  a  man  is  usually,  by 
a  natural  impulse,  in  harmony  also  with  others.  Like 
Leonardo,  who  through  the  glow  of  his  adoration  oi 
Nature  was  as  truly  a  mystic  as  St.  Francis,  even  by 
contact  with  him  “every  broken  heart  is  made  serene.” 
But  a  religious  man  is  not  necessarily  a  moral  man. 
That  is  to  say  that  we  must  by  no  means  expect  to 
And  that  the  religious  man,  even  when  he  is  in  harmony 

1  Dean  Inge  {Philosophy  of  Plotinus,  vol.  11,  p.  165)  has  some  remarks 
00  Plotinus  in  relation  to  asceticism. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


224 

with  his  fellows,  is  necessarily  in  harmony  with  the 
moral  laws  of  his  age.  We  fall  into  sad  confusion  if  we 
take  for  granted  that  a  mystic  is  what  we  conven¬ 
tionally  term  a  “ moral”  man.  Jesus,  as  we  know,  was 
almost  as  immoral  from  the  standpoint  of  the  society 
in  which  he  moved  as  he  would  be  in  our  society.  That, 
no  doubt,  is  an  extreme  example,  yet  the  same  holds 
good,  in  a  minor  degree,  of  many  other  mystics,  even 
in  very  recent  times.  The  satyrs  and  the  fauns  were 
minor  divinities  in  antiquity,  and  in  later  times  we 
have  been  apt  to  misunderstand  their  holy  functions 
and  abuse  their  sacred  names. 

Not  only  is  there  no  necessary  moral  change  in  such 
a  process,  still  less  is  there  any  necessary  intellectual 
change.  Religion  need  not  involve  intellectual  suicide. 
On  the  intellectual  side  there  may  be  no  obvious 
change  whatever.  No  new  creed  or  dogma  had  been 
adopted.1  It  might  rather  be  said  that,  on  the  con¬ 
trary,  some  prepossessions,  hitherto  unconscious,  had 
been  realised  and  cast  out.  The  operations  of  reason, 
so  far  from  being  fettered,  can  be  effected  with  greater 
freedom  and  on  a  larger  scale.  Under  favourable 
conditions  the  religious  process,  indeed,  throughout 
directly  contributes  to  strengthen  the  scientific  atti- 

1  Jules  de  Gaultier  (La  Philosophic  officielle  et  la  Philosophic ,  p.  150) 
refers  to  those  Buddhist  monks  the  symbol  of  whose  faith  was  contained 
in  one  syllable:  Om.  But  those  monks,  he  adds,  belonged  to  “the  only 
philosophic  race  that  ever  existed”  and  by  the  aid  of  their  pure  faith, 
placed  on  a  foundation  which  no  argumentation  can  upset,  all  the  re¬ 
ligious  philosophies  of  the  Judeo-Iielleno-Christian  tradition  are  but 
as  fairy-tales  told  to  children. 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


225 


tude.  The  mere  fact  that  one  has  been  impelled  by  the 
sincerity  of  one’s  religious  faith  to  question,  to  analyse, 
and  finally  to  destroy  one’s  religious  creed,  is  itself  an 
incomparable  training  for  the  intelligence.  In  this 
task  reason  is  submitted  to  the  hardest  tests;  it  has 
every  temptation  to  allow  itself  to  be  lulled  into  sleepy 
repose  or  cajoled  into  specious  reconciliations.  If  it  is 
true  to  itself  here  it  is  steeled  for  every  other  task  in 
the  world,  for  no  other  task  can  ever  demand  so  com¬ 
plete  a  self-sacrifice  at  the  call  of  Truth.  Indeed,  the 
final  restoration  of  the  religious  impulse  on  a  higher 
plane  may  itself  be  said  to  reenforce  the  scientific  im¬ 
pulse,  for  it  removes  that  sense  of  psychic  disharmony 
which  is  a  subconscious  fetter  on  the  rational  activity. 
The  new  inward  harmony,  proceeding  from  a  psychic 
centre  that  is  at  one  alike  with  itself  and  with  the 
Not-Self,  imparts  confidence  to  every  operation  of  the 
intellect.  All  the  metaphysical  images  of  faith  in  the 
unseen  —  too  familiar  in  the  mystical  experiences  of 
men  of  all  religions  to  need  specification  —  are  now  on 
the  side  of  science.  For  he  who  is  thus  held  in  his  path 
can  pursue  that  path  with  serenity  and  trust,  however 
daring  its  course  may  sometimes  seem. 

It  appears  to  me,  therefore,  on  the  basis  of  personal 
experience,  that  the  process  thus  outlined  is  a  natural 
process.  The  harmony  of  the  religious  impulse  and  of 
the  scientific  impulse  is  not  merely  a  conclusion  to  be 
deduced  from  the  history  of  the  past.  It  is  a  living 
fact  to-day.  However  obscured  it  may  sometimes  be, 


226  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

the  process  lies  in  human  nature  and  is  still  open  to  all 
to  experience. 


IV 

If  the  development  of  the  religious  instinct  and  the 
development  of  the  scientific  instinct  are  alike  natural, 
and  if  the  possibility  of  the  harmony  of  the  two  in¬ 
stincts  is  a  verifiable  fact  of  experience,  how  is  it,  one 
may  ask,  that  there  has  ever  been  any  dispute  on  the 
matter?  Why  has  not  this  natural  experience  been  the 
experience  of  all? 

Various  considerations  may  help  to  make  clear  to 
us  how  it  has  happened  that  a  process  which  might 
reasonably  be  supposed  to  be  intimate  and  sacred 
should  have  become  so  obscured  and  so  deformed 
that  it  has  been  fiercely  bandied  about  by  opposing 
factions.  At  the  outset,  as  we  have  seen,  among  com¬ 
paratively  primitive  peoples,  it  really  is  a  simple 
and  natural  process  carried  out  harmoniously  with 
no  sense  of  conflict.  A  man,  it  would  seem,  was  not 
then  overburdened  by  the  still  unwritten  traditions 
of  the  race.  He  was  comparatively  free  to  exercise 
his  own  impulses  unfettered  by  the  chains  forged 
out  of  the  dead  impulses  of  those  who  had  gone 
before  him. 

It  is  the  same  still  among  uncultivated  persons  of 
our  own  race  in  civilisation.  I  well  remember  how  once, 
during  a  long  ride  through  the  Australian  bush  with  a 
settler,  a  quiet,  uncommunicative  man  with  whom  I 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


227 


had  long  been  acquainted,  he  suddenly  told  me  how  at 
times  he  would  ascend  to  the  top  of  a  hill  and  become 
lost  to  himself  and  to  everything  as  he  stood  in  con¬ 
templation  of  the  scene  around  him.  Those  moments 
of  ecstasy,  of  self-forgetful  union  with  the  divine 
beauty  of  Nature,  were  entirely  compatible  with  the 
rational  outlook  of  a  simple,  hard-working  man  who 
never  went  to  church,  for  there  was  no  church  of  any 
kind  to  go  to,  but  at  such  moments  had  in  his  own 
humble  way,  like  Moses,  met  God  in  a  mountain. 
There  can  be  no  doubt  that  such  an  experience  is  not 
uncommon  among  simple  folk  unencumbered  by  tradi¬ 
tion,  even  when  of  civilised  race. 

The  burden  of  traditions,  of  conventions,  of  castes 
has  too  often  proved  fatal  alike  to  the  manifestation  of 
the  religious  impulse  and  the  scientific  impulse.  It  is 
unnecessary  to  point  out  how  easily  this  happens  in 
the  case  of  the  religious  impulse.  It  is  only  too  familiar 
a  fact  how,  when  the  impulse  of  religion  first  germi¬ 
nates  in  the  young  soul,  the  ghouls  of  the  Churches  rush 
out  of  their  caverns,  seize  on  the  unhappy  victim  of  the 
divine  effluence  and  proceed  to  assure  him  that  his 
rapture  is,  not  a  natural  manifestation,  as  free  as  the 
sunlight  and  as  gracious  as  the  unfolding  of  a  rose,  but 
the  manifest  sign  that  he  has  been  branded  by  a  super¬ 
natural  force  and  fettered  for  ever  to  a  dead  theological 
creed.  Too  often  he  is  thus  caught  by  the  bait  of  his 
own  rapture;  the  hook  is  firmly  fixed  in  his  jaw  and  he 
is  drawn  whither  his  blind  guides  will;  his  wings  droop 


228 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


and  fall  away;  so  far  as  the  finer  issues  of  life  are  con¬ 
cerned,  he  is  done  for  and  damned.1 

But  the  process  is  not  so  very  different  on  the  sci¬ 
entific  side,  though  here  it  is  more  subtly  concealed. 
The  youth  in  whom  the  natural  impulse  of  science 
arises  is  sternly  told  that  the  spontaneous  movement 
of  his  intelligence  towards  Nature  and  truth  is  noth¬ 
ing,  for  the  one  thing  needful  is  that  he  shall  be  put  to 
discipline,  and  trained  in  the  scientific  traditions  of 
the  ages.  The  desirability  of  such  training  for  the 
effective  questioning  of  Nature  is  so  clear  that  both 
teacher  and  pupil  are  apt  to  overlook  the  fact  that 
it  involves  much  that  is  not  science  at  all:  all  sorts 
of  dead  traditions,  unrealised  fragments  of  ancient 
metaphysical  systems,  prepossessions  and  limitations, 
conscious  or  unconscious,  the  obedience  to  arbitrary 
authorities.  It  is  never  made  clear  to  him  that  science 
also  is  an  art.  So  that  the  actual  outcome  may  be  that 
the  finally  accomplished  man  of  science  has  as  little  of 
the  scientific  impulse  as  the  fully  fledged  religious  man 
need  have  of  the  religious  impulse;  he  becomes  the 
victim  of  another  kind  of  ecclesiastical  sectarianism. 

There  is  one  special  piece  of  ancient  metaphysics 
which  until  recently  scientific  and  religious  sects  have 

1  We  must  always  remember  that  “Church'*  and  “religion/*  though 
often  confused,  are  far  from  being  interchangeable  terms.  “  Religion”  is 
a  natural  impulse,  “Church  ”  is  a  social  institution.  The  confusion  is  un¬ 
fortunate.  Thus  Freud  ( Group  Psychology ,  p.  51)  speaks  of  the  proba¬ 
bility  of  religion  disappearing  and  Socialism  taking  its  place.  He  means 
not  “religion,”  but  a  “Church.”  We  cannot  speak  of  a  natural  impulse 
disappearing,  an  institution  easily  may. 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


229 


alike  combined  to  support:  the  fiction  of  “ matter,’’ 
which  we  passingly  came  upon  when  considering  the 
art  of  thinking.  It  is  a  fiction  that  has  much  to  answer 
for  in  distorting  the  scientific  spirit  and  in  creating  an 
artificial  opposition  between  science  and  religion.  All 
sorts  of  antique  metaphysical  peculiarities,  inherited 
from  the  decadence  of  Greek  philosophy,  were  attrib¬ 
uted  to  “matter”  and  they  were  mostly  of  a  bad  char¬ 
acter;  all  the  good  qualities  were  attributed  to  “spirit” ; 
“matter”  played  the  Devil's  part  to  this  more  divine 
“spirit.”  Thus  it  was  that  “materialistic”  came  to  be 
a  term  signifying  all  that  is  most  heavy,  opaque,  de¬ 
pressing,  soul-destroying,  and  diabolical  in  the  uni¬ 
verse.  The  party  of  traditionalised  religion  fostered 
this  fiction  and  the  party  of  traditionalised  science 
frequently  adopted  it,  cheerily  proposing  to  find  infi¬ 
nite  potentialities  in  this  despised  metaphysical  sub¬ 
stance.  So  that  “matter”  which  was  on  one  side 
trodden  underfoot  was  on  the  other  side  brandished 
overhead  as  a  glorious  banner. 

Yet  “matter,”  as  psychologically  minded  philoso¬ 
phers  at  last  began  to  point  out,  is  merely  a  substance 
we  have  ourselves  invented  to  account  for  our  sensa¬ 
tions.  We  see,  we  touch,  we  hear,  we  smell,  and  by  a 
brilliant  synthetic  effort  of  imagination  we  put  to¬ 
gether  all  those  sensations  and  picture  to  ourselves 
“matter”  as  being  the  source  of  them.  Science  itself 
is  now  purging  “matter”  of  its  complicated  meta¬ 
physical  properties.  That  “matter,”  the  nature  of 


230 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


which  Dr.  Johnson,  as  Boswell  tells  us,  thought  he  had 
settled  by  “  striking  his  foot  with  mighty  force  against 
a  large  stone,”  is  coming  to  be  regarded  as  merely  an 
electrical  emanation.  We  now  accept  even  that  trans¬ 
mutation  of  the  elements  of  which  the  alchemists 
dreamed.  It  is  true  that  we  still  think  of  “matter”  as 
having  weight.  But  so  cautious  a  physicist  as  Sir 
Joseph  Thomson  long  ago  pointed  out  that  weight  is 
only  an  “apparently”  invariable  property  of  matter. 
So  that  “matter”  becomes  almost  as  “ethereal”  as 
“spirit,”  and,  indeed,  scarcely  distinguishable  from 
“spirit.”  The  spontaneous  affirmation  of  the  mystic 
that  he  lives  in  the  spiritual  world  here  and  now  will 
then  be,  in  other  words,  merely  the  same  affirmation 
which  the  man  of  science  has  more  laboriously  reached. 
The  man,  therefore,  who  is  terrified  by  “materialism” 
has  reached  the  final  outpost  of  absurdity.  He  is  a 
simple-minded  person  who  places  his  own  hand  before 
his  eyes  and  cries  out  in  horror:  The  Universe  has 
disappeared ! 

We  have  not  only  to  realise  how  our  own  preposses¬ 
sions  and  the  metaphysical  figments  of  our  own  crea¬ 
tion  have  obscured  the  simple  realities  of  religion  and 
science  alike ;  we  have  also  to  see  that  our  timid  dread 
lest  religion  should  kill  our  science,  or  science  kill  our 
religion,  is  equally  fatal  here.  He  who  would  gain  his 
life  must  be  willing  to  lose  it,  and  it  is  by  being  honest 
to  one’s  self  and  to  the  facts  by  applying  courageously 
the  measuring  rod  of  Truth,  that  in  the  end  salvation 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


231 

is  found.  Here,  it  is  true,  there  are  those  who  smilingly 
assure  us  that  by  adopting  such  a  method  we  shall 
merely  put  ourselves  in  the  wrong  and  endure  much 
unnecessary  suffering.  There  is  no  such  thing  as 
“Truth,”  they  declare,  regarded  as  an  objective  im¬ 
personal  reality ;  we  do  not  “discover”  truth,  we  invent 
it.  Therefore  your  business  is  to  invent  a  truth  which 
shall  harmoniously  satisfy  the  needs  of  your  nature 
and  aid  your  efficiency  in  practical  life.  That  we  are 
justified  in  being  dishonest  towards  truth  has  even 
been  argued  from  the  doctrine  of  relativity  by  some 
who  failed  to  realise  that  that  doctrine  is  here  hardly 
relative.  Certainly  the  philosophers  of  recent  times, 
from  Nietzsche  to  Croce,  have  loved  to  analyse  the 
idea  of  “truth”  and  to  show  that  it  by  no  means  signi¬ 
fies  what  we  used  to  suppose  it  signified.  But  to  show 
that  truth  is  fluid,  or  even  the  creation  of  the  individual 
mind,  is  by  no  means  to  show  that  we  can  at  will  play 
fast  and  loose  with  it  to  suit  our  own  momentary  con¬ 
venience.  If  we  do  we  merely  find  ourselves,  at  the 
end,  in  a  pool  where  we  must  tramp  round  and  round 
in  intellectual  slush  out  of  which  there  is  no  issue. 
One  may  well  doubt  whether  any  Pragmatist  has  ever 
really  invented  his  truth  that  way.  Practically,  just  as 
the  best  result  is  attained  by  the  man  who  acts  as 
though  free-will  were  a  reality  and  who  exerts  it,  so  in 
this  matter,  also,  practically,  in  the  end  the  best  result 
is  attained  by  assuming  that  truth  is  an  objective  real¬ 
ity  which  we  must  patiently  seek,  and  in  accordance 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


232 

with  which  we  must  discipline  our  own  wayward  im¬ 
pulses.  There  is  no  transcendent  objective  truth,  each 
one  of  us  is  an  artist  creating  his  own  truth  from  the 
phenomena  presented  to  him,  but  if  in  that  creation  he 
allows  any  alien  emotional  or  practical  considerations 
to  influence  him  he  is  a  bad  artist  and  his  work  is 
wrought  for  destruction.  From  the  pragmatic  point  of 
view,  it  may  thus  be  said  that  if  the  use  of  the  measur¬ 
ing-rod  of  truth  as  an  objective  standard  produces  the 
best  practical  results,  that  use  is  pragmatically  justi¬ 
fied.  But  if  so,  we  are  exactly  in  the  same  position  as 
we  were  before  the  pragmatist  arrived ;  we  can  get  on 
as  well  without  him,  if  not  better,  for  we  run  the  risk 
that  he  may  confuse  the  issues  for  us.  It  is  really  on 
the  theoretic  rather  than  the  practical  side  that  he  is 
helpful. 

It  is  not  only  the  Pragmatist  whose  well-meant 
efforts  to  find  an  easy  reconciliation  of  belief  and 
practice,  and  indirectly  the  concord  of  religion  and 
science,  come  to  grief  because  he  has  not  realised  that 
the  walls  of  the  spiritual  world  can  only  be  scaled  with 
much  expenditure  of  treasure,  not  without  blood  and 
sweat,  that  we  cannot  glide  luxuriously  to  Heaven  in 
his  motor-car.  We  are  also  met  by  the  old-fashioned 
Intuitionist.1  It  is  no  accident  that  the  Intuitionist  so 

1  It  must  be  remembered  that  “intuition”  is  a  word  with  all  sorts  of 
philosophical  meanings,  in  addition  to  its  psychological  meanings 
(which  were  studied  some  years  ago  by  Dearborn  in  the  Psychological 
Review).  For  the  ancient  philosophic  writers,  from  the  Neo-Platonists 
cm,  it  was  usually  a  sort  of  special  organ  for  coming  in  contact  with 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION  233 

often  walks  hand  in  hand  with  the  Pragmatist;  they 
are  engaged  in  the  same  tasks.  There  is,  we  have  seen, 
the  impulse  of  science  which  must  work  through  in¬ 
telligence;  there  is,  also,  the  impulse  of  religion  in  the 
satisfaction  of  which  intelligence  can  only  take  a  very 
humble  place  at  the  antechamber  of  the  sanctuary. 
To  admit,  therefore,  that  reason  cannot  extend  into  the 
religious  sphere  is  absolutely  sound  so  long  as  we  realise 
that  reason  has  a  coordinate  right  to  lay  down  the 
rules  in  its  own  sphere  of  intelligence.  But  in  men  of  a 
certain  mental  type  the  two  tendencies  are  alike  so 
deeply  implanted  that  they  cannot  escape  them:  they 
are  not  only  impelled  to  go  beyond  intelligence,  but 
they  are  also  impelled  to  carry  intelligence  with  them 
outside  its  sphere.  The  sphere  of  intelligence  is  limited, 
they  say,  and  rightly;  the  soul  has  other  impulses 
besides  that  of  intelligence  and  life  needs  more  than 
knowledge  for  its  complete  satisfaction.  But  in  the 
hands  of  these  people  the  faculty  of  “intuition,” 
which  is  to  supplant  that  of  intelligence,  itself  results 
in  a  product  which  by  them  is  called  “knowledge,”  and 
so  spuriously  bears  the  hall-mark  which  belongs  to  the 
product  of  intelligence. 

But  the  result  is  disastrous.  Not  only  is  an  illegiti¬ 
mate  confusion  introduced,  but,  by  attributing  to  the 

supernatural  realities;  for  Bergson  it  is  at  once  a  method  superior  to  the 
intellect  for  obtaining  knowledge  and  a  method  of  aesthetic  contempla¬ 
tion;  for  Croce  it  is  solely  aesthetic,  and  art  is  at  once  “intuition”  and 
“expression”  (by  which  he  means  the  formation  of  internal  imagee). 
For  Croce,  when  the  mind  “intuits”  by  “expressing,”  the  result  ia 
art.  There  is  no  “religion”  for  Croce  except  philosophy. 


234 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


impulse  of  religion  a  character  which  it  is  neither  en¬ 
titled  to  nor  in  need  of,  we  merely  discredit  it  in  the 
eyes  of  intelligence.  The  philosopher  of  intuition,  even 
in  denying  intelligence,  is  apt  to  remain  so  predomi¬ 
nantly  intelligent  that,  even  in  entering  what  is  for  him 
the  sphere  of  religion,  he  still  moves  in  an  atmosphere 
of  rarefied  intelligence.  He  is  farther  from  the  King¬ 
dom  of  Heaven  than  the  simple  man  who  is  quite 
incapable  of  understanding  the  philosopher’s  theory, 
but  yet  may  be  able  to  follow  his  own  religious  im¬ 
pulse  without  foisting  into  it  an  intellectual  content. 
For  even  the  simple  man  may  be  one  with  the  great 
mystics  who  all  declare  that  the  unspeakable  quality 
they  have  acquired,  as  Eckhart  puts  it,  “hath  no 
image.”  It  is  not  in  the  sphere  of  intellection,  it  brings 
no  knowledge;  it  is  the  outcome  of  the  natural  instinct 
of  the  individual  soul. 

No  doubt  there  really  are  people  in  whom  the  in¬ 
stincts  of  religion  and  of  science  alike  are  developed  in 
so  rudimentary  a  degree,  if  developed  at  all,  that  they 
never  become  conscious.  The  religious  instinct  is  not 
an  essential  instinct.  Even  the  instinct  of  sex,  which  is 
much  more  fundamental  than  either  of  these,  is  not 
absolutely  essential.  A  very  little  bundle  of  instincts 
and  impulses  is  indispensable  to  a  man  on  his  way 
down  the  path  of  life  to  a  peaceful  and  humble  grave. 
A  man’s  equipment  of  tendencies,  on  the  lowest  plane, 
needs  to  be  more  complex  and  diverse  than  an  oyster’s, 
yet  not  so  very  much  more.  The  equipment  of  the 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


235 

higher  animals,  moreover,  is  needed  less  for  the  good 
of  the  individual  than  for  the  good  of  the  race.  We 
cannot,  therefore,  be  surprised  if  the  persons  in  whom 
the  superfluous  instincts  are  rudimentary  fail  to  under¬ 
stand  them,  confusing  them  and  overlaying  them  with 
each  other  and  with  much  that  is  outside  both.  The 
wonder  would  be  if  it  were  otherwise. 

When  all  deduction  has  been  made  of  the  mental 
and  emotional  confusions  which  have  obscured  men’s 
vision,  we  cannot  fail  to  conclude,  it  seems  to  me,  that 
Science  and  Mysticism  are  nearer  to  each  other  than 
some  would  have  us  believe.  At  the  beginning  of 
human  cultures,  far  from  being  opposed,  they  may 
even  be  said  to  be  identical.  From  time  to  time,  in 
later  ages,  brilliant  examples  have  appeared  of  men 
who  have  possessed  both  instincts  in  a  high  degree  and 
have  even  fused  the  two  together,  while  among  the 
humble  in  spirit  and  the  lowly  in  intellect  it  is  probable 
that  in  all  ages  innumerable  men  have  by  instinct 
harmonised  their  religion  with  their  intelligence.  But 
as  the  accumulated  experiences  of  civilisation  have 
been  preserved  and  handed  on  from  generation  to 
generation,  this  free  and  vital  play  of  the  instincts  has 
been  largely  paralysed.  On  each  side  fossilised  tradi¬ 
tions  have  accumulated  so  thickly,  the  garments  of 
dead  metaphysics  have  been  wrapped  so  closely  around 
every  manifestation  alike  of  the  religious  instinct  and 
the  scientific  instinct  —  for  even  what  we  call  “com¬ 
mon  sense"  is  really  a  hardened  mass  of  dead  meta- 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


236 

physics  —  that  not  many  persons  can  succeed  in  re¬ 
vealing  one  of  these  instincts  in  its  naked  beauty,  and 
very  few  can  succeed  in  so  revealing  both  instincts. 
Hence  a  perpetual  antagonism.  It  may  be,  however, 
we  are  beginning  to  realise  that  there  are  no  meta¬ 
physical  formulas  to  suit  all  men,  but  that  every  man 
must  be  the  artist  of  his  own  philosophy.  As  we 
realise  that,  it  becomes  easier  than  it  was  before  to 
liberate  ourselves  from  a  dead  metaphysics,  and  so  to 
give  free  play  alike  to  the  religious  instinct  and  the 
scientific  instinct.  A  man  must  not  swallow  more 
beliefs  than  he  can  digest;  no  man  can  absorb  all  the 
traditions  of  the  past;  what  he  fills  himself  with  will 
only  be  a  poison  to  work  to  his  own  auto-intoxication. 

Along  all  these  lines  we  see  more  clearly  than  before 
the  real  harmony  between  Mysticism  and  Science. 
We  see,  also,  that  all  arguments  are  meaningless  until 
we  gain  personal  experience.  One  must  win  one’s  own 
place  in  the  spiritual  world  painfully  and  alone.  There 
is  no  other  way  of  salvation.  The  Promised  Land  al¬ 
ways  lies  on  the  other  side  of  a  wilderness. 

V 

It  may  seem  that  we  have  been  harping  overmuch  on  a 
single  string  of  what  is  really  a  very  rich  instrument, 
when  the  whole  exalted  art  of  religion  is  brought  down 
to  the  argument  of  its  relationship  to  science.  The 
core  of  religion  is  mysticism,  it  is  admitted.  And  yet 
where  are  all  the  great  mystics?  Why  nothing  of  the 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


237 

Neo-Platonists  in  whom  the  whole  movement  of  mod¬ 
ern  mysticism  began,  of  their  glorious  pupils  in  the 
Moslem  world,  of  Ramon  Lull  and  Francis  of  Assisi 
and  Francois  Xavier  and  John  of  the  Cross  and  George 
Fox  and  the  “De  Imitatione  Christi”  and  “  Towards 
Democracy”?  There  is  no  end  to  that  list  of  glorious 
names,  and  they  are  all  passed  by. 

To  write  of  the  mystics,  whether  Pagan  or  Christian 
or  Islamic,  is  a  most  delightful  task.  It  has  been  done, 
and  often  very  well  done.  The  mystics  are  not  only 
themselves  an  incarnation  of  beauty,  but  they  reflect 
beauty  on  all  who  with  understanding  approach  them. 

Moreover,  in  the  phenomena  of  religious  mysticism 
we  have  a  key  —  if  we  only  knew  it  —  to  many  of  the 
most  precious  human  things  which  on  the  surface  may 
seem  to  have  nothing  in  them  of  religion.  For  this  is  an 
art  which  instinctively  reveals  to  us  the  secrets  of 
other  arts.  It  presents  to  us  in  the  most  naked  and 
essential  way  the  inward  experience  which  has  inspired 
men  to  find  modes  of  expression  which  are  transmuta¬ 
tions  of  the  art  of  religion  and  yet  have  on  the  surface 
nothing  to  indicate  that  this  is  so.  It  has  often  been 
seen  in  poetry  and  in  music  and  in  painting.  One 
might  say  that  it  is  scarcely  possible  to  understand 
completely  the  poetry  of  Shelley  or  the  music  of  C6sar 
Franck  or  the  pictures  of  Van  Gogh  unless  there  is 
somewhere  within  an  intimation  of  the  secret  of 
mysticism.  This  is  go  not  because  of  any  imperfection 
in  the  achieved  work  of  such  men  in  poetry  and  in 


238  '  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

music  and  in  painting,  —  for  work  that  fails  to  contain 
its  own  justification  is  always  bad  work,  —  but  be¬ 
cause  we  shall  not  be  in  possession  of  the  clue  to  explain 
the  existence  of  that  work.  We  may  even  go  beyond 
the  sphere  of  the  recognised  arts  altogether,  and  say 
that  the  whole  love  of  Nature  and  landscape,  which  in 
modern  times  has  been  so  greatly  developed,  largely 
through  Rousseau,  the  chief  creator  of  our  modern 
spiritual  world,  is  not  intelligible  if  we  are  altogether 
ignorant  of  what  religion  means. 

But  we  are  not  so  much  concerned  here  with  the 
rich  and  variegated  garments  the  impulse  of  religion 
puts  on,  or  with  its  possible  transmutations,  as  with 
the  simple  and  naked  shape  of  those  impulses  when 
bared  of  all  garments.  It  was  peculiarly  important  to 
present  the  impulse  of  mysticism  naked  because,  of  all 
the  fundamental  human  impulses,  that  is  the  one  most 
often  so  richly  wrapped  round  with  gorgeous  and 
fantastic  garments  that,  alike  to  the  eye  of  the  ordinary 
man  and  the  acute  philosopher,  there  has  seemed  to  be 
no  living  thing  inside  at  all.  It  was  necessary  to  strip 
off  all  these  garments,  to  appeal  to  simple  personal 
direct  experience  for  the  actual  core  of  fact,  and  to 
show  that  that  core,  so  far  from  being  soluble  by 
analysis  into  what  science  counts  as  nothing,  is  itself, 
like  every  other  natural  organic  function,  a  fact  of 
science. 

It  is  enough  here,  where  we  are  concerned  only  with 
the  primary  stuff  of  art,  the  bare  simple  technique  of 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


239 


the  human  dance,  to  have  brought  into  as  clear  a  light 
as  may  be  the  altogether  natural  mechanism  which 
lies  behind  all  the  most  magnificent  fantasies  of  the 
mystic  impulse,  and  would  still  subsist  and  operate 
even  though  they  were  all  cast  into  the  flames.  That  is 
why  it  has  seemed  necessary  to  dwell  all  the  time  on 
the  deep-lying  harmony  of  the  mystic’s  attitude  with 
the  scientific  man’s  attitude.  It  is  a  harmony  which 
rests  on  the  faith  that  they  are  eternally  separate, 
however  close,  however  intimately  cooperative.  When 
the  mystic  professes  that,  as  such,  he  has  knowledge  of 
the  same  order  as  the  man  of  science,  or  when  the 
scientist  claims  that,  as  such,  he  has  emotion  which  is 
like  that  of  the  man  of  religion,  each  of  them  deceives 
himself.  He  has  introduced  a  confusion  where  no  con¬ 
fusion  need  be;  perhaps,  indeed,  he  has  even  com¬ 
mitted  that  sin  against  the  Holy  Ghost  of  his  own 
spiritual  integrity  for  which  there  is  no  forgiveness. 
The  function  of  intellectual  thought  —  which  is  that 
of  the  art  of  science  —  may,  certainly,  be  invaluable 
for  religion ;  it  makes  possible  the  purgation  of  all  that 
pseudo-science,  all  that  philosophy,  good  or  bad, 
which  has  poisoned  and  encrusted  the  simple  spontane¬ 
ous  impulse  of  mysticism  in  the  open  air  of  Nature  and 
in  the  face  of  the  sun.  The  man  of  science  may  be  a 
mystic,  but  cannot  be  a  true  mystic  unless  he  is  so 
relentless  a  man  of  science  that  he  can  tolerate  no 
alien  science  in  his  mysticism.  The  mystic  may  be  a 
man  of  science,  but  he  will  not  be  a  good  man  of 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


240 

science  unless  he  understands  that  science  must  be 
kept  for  ever  bright  and  pure  from  all  admixture  of 
mystical  emotion;  the  fountain  of  his  emotion  must 
never  rust  the  keenness  of  his  analytic  scalpel.  It  is 
useless  to  pretend  that  any  such  rustiness  can  ever  con¬ 
cert  the  scalpel  into  a  mystical  implement,  though  it 
can  be  an  admirable  aid  in  cutting  towards  the  mys¬ 
tical  core  of  things,  and  perhaps  if  there  were  more 
relentless  scientific  men  there  would  be  more  men  of 
pure  mystic  vision.  Science  by  itself,  good  or  bad,  can 
never  be  religion,  any  more  than  religion  by  itself  can 
ever  be  science,  or  even  philosophy. 

It  is  by  looking  back  into  the  past  that  we  see  the 
facts  in  an  essential  simplicity  less  easy  to  reach  in 
more  sophisticated  ages.  We  need  not  again  go  so  far 
back  as  the  medicine-men  of  Africa  and  Siberia. 
Mysticism  in  pagan  antiquity,  however  less  intimate 
to  us  and  less  seductive  than  that  of  later  times,  is 
perhaps  better  fitted  to  reveal  to  us  its  true  nature. 
The  Greeks  believed  in  the  spiritual  value  of  “  conver¬ 
sion”  as  devoutly  as  our  Christian  sects  and  they 
went  beyond  most  such  sects  in  their  elaborately 
systematic  methods  for  obtaining  it,  no  doubt  for  the 
most  part  as  superficially  as  has  been  common  among 
Christians.  It  is  supposed  that  almost  the  whole  popu¬ 
lation  of  Athens  must  have  experienced  the  Eleusinian 
initiation.  These  methods,  as  we  know,  were  embodied 
in  the  Mysteries  associated  with  Dionysus  and  Deme¬ 
ter  and  Orpheus  and  the  rest,  the  most  famous  and 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


241 


typical  being  those  of  Attic  Eleusis.1  We  too  often  see 
those  ancient  Greek  Mysteries  through  a  concealing 
mist,  partly  because  it  was  rightly  felt  that  matters  of 
spiritual  experience  were  not  things  to  talk  about,  so 
that  precise  information  is  lacking,  partly  because  the 
early  Christians,  having  their  own  very  similar  Mys¬ 
teries  to  uphold,  were  careful  to  speak  evil  of  Pagan 
Mysteries,  and  partly  because  the  Pagan  Mysteries  no 
doubt  really  tended  to  degenerate  with  the  general 
decay  of  classic  culture.  But  in  their  large  simple 
essential  outlines  they  seem  to  be  fairly  clear.  For  just 
as  there  was  nothing  “orgiastic”  in  our  sense  in  the 
Greek  “orgies,”  which  were  simply  ritual  acts,  so 
there  was  nothing,  in  our  sense,  “mysterious”  in  the 
Mysteries.  We  are  not  to  suppose,  as  is  sometimes 
supposed,  that  their  essence  was  a  secret  doctrine,  or 
even  that  the  exhibition  of  a  secret  rite  was  the  sole 
object,  although  it  came  in  as  part  of  the  method.  A 
mystery  meant  a  spiritual  process  of  initiation,  which 
was,  indeed,  necessarily  a  secret  to  those  who  had  not 
yet  experienced  it,  but  had  nothing  in  itself  “mysteri¬ 
ous”  beyond  what  inheres  to-day  to  the  process  in  any 
Christian  “revival,”  which  is  the  nearest  analogue  to 


1  The  modern  literature  of  the  Mysteries,  especially  of  Eleusis,  is  very 
extensive  and  elaborate  in  many  languages.  I  will  only  mention  here  a 
small  and  not  very  recent  book,  Cheetham’s  Hulsean  Lectures  on  Ths 
Mysteries  Pagan  and  Christian  (1897)  as  for  ordinary  readers  sufficiently 
indicating  the  general  significance  of  the  Mysteries.  There  is,  yet 
briefer,  a  more  modern  discussion  of  the  matter  in  the  Chapter  on  “Re¬ 
ligion”  by  Dr.  W.  R.  Inge  in  R.  W.  Livingstone’s  useful  collection  oi 
essays,  The  legacy  of  Greece  (1921). 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


242 

the  Greek  Mystery.  It  is  only  “mysterious”  in  the 
sense  that  it  cannot  be  expressed,  any  more  than  the 
sexual  embrace  can  be  expressed,  in  words,  but  can 
only  be  known  by  experience.  A  preliminary  process 
of  purification,  the  influence  of  suggestion,  a  certain 
religious  faith,  a  solemn  and  dramatic  ritual  carried 
out  under  the  most  impressive  circumstances,  having 
a  real  analogy  to  the  Catholic’s  Mass,  which  also  is  a 
function,  at  once  dramatic  and  sacred,  which  cul¬ 
minates  in  a  spiritual  communion  with  the  Divine  — 
all  this  may  contribute  to  the  end  which  was,  as  it 
always  must  be  in  religion,  simply  a  change  of  inner 
attitude,  a  sudden  exalting  realisation  of  a  new  rela¬ 
tionship  to  eternal  things.  The  philosophers  under¬ 
stood  this;  Aristotle  was  careful  to  point  out,  in  an 
extant  fragment,  that  what  was  gained  in  the  Myster¬ 
ies  was  not  instruction  but  impressions  and  emotions, 
and  Plato  had  not  hesitated  to  regard  the  illumination 
which  came  to  the  initiate  in  philosophy  as  of  the 
nature  of  that  acquired  in  the  Mysteries.  So  it  was 
natural  that  when  Christianity  took  the  place  of 
Paganism  the  same  process  went  on  with  only  a  change 
in  external  circumstances.  Baptism  in  the  early 
Church  —  before  it  sank  to  the  mere  magical  sort  of 
rite  it  later  became  —  was  of  the  nature  of  initiation 
into  a  Mystery,  preceded  by  careful  preparation,  and 
the  baptised  initiate  was  sometimes  crowned  with  a 
garland  as  the  initiated  were  at  Eleusis. 

When  we  go  out  of  Athens  along  the  beautiful  road 


THE  ART  OF  RELIGION 


243 

that  leads  to  the  wretched  village  of  Eleusis  and  linger 
among  the  vast  and  complicated  ruins  of  the  chief 
shrine  of  mysticism  in  our  Western  world,  rich  in  asso¬ 
ciations  that  seem  to  stretch  back  to  the  Neolithic  Age 
and  suggest  a  time  when  the  mystery  of  the  blossoming 
of  the  soul  was  one  with  the  mystery  of  the  upspringing 
of  the  corn,  it  may  be  that  our  thoughts  by  no  un¬ 
natural  transition  pass  from  the  myth  of  Demeter  and 
Kore  to  the  remembrance  of  what  we  may  have  heard 
or  know  of  the  manifestations  of  the  spirit  among 
barbarian  northerners  of  other  faiths  or  of  no  faith  in 
far  Britain  and  America  and  even  of  their  meetings  of 
so-called  “revival.”  For  it  is  always  the  same  thing 
that  Man  is  doing,  however  various  and  fantastic  the 
disguises  he  adopts.  And  sometimes  the  revelation  of 
the  new  life,  springing  up  from  within,  comes  amid  the 
crowd  in  the  feverish  atmosphere  of  artificial  shrines, 
maybe  soon  to  shrivel  up,  and  sometimes  the  blossom¬ 
ing  forth  takes  place,  perhaps  more  favourably,  in  the 
open  air  and  under  the  light  of  the  sun  and  amid  the 
flowers,  as  it  were  to  a  happy  faun  among  the  hills. 
But  when  all  disguises  have  been  stripped  away,  it  is 
always  and  everywhere  the  same  simple  process,  a 
spiritual  function  which  is  almost  a  physiological  func¬ 
tion,  an  art  which  Nature  makes.  That  is  alL 


CHAPTER  VI 
THE  ART  OF  MORALS 

I 

No  man  has  ever  counted  the  books  that  have  been 
written  about  morals.  No  subject  seems  so  fascinating 
to  the  human  mind.  It  may  well  be,  indeed,  that 
nothing  imports  us  so  much  as  to  know  how  to  live. 
Yet  it  can  scarcely  be  that  on  any  subject  are  the  books 
that  have  been  written  more  unprofitable,  one  might 
even  say  unnecessary. 

For  when  we  look  at  the  matter  objectively  it  is, 
after  all,  fairly  simple.  If  we  turn  our  attention  to  any 
collective  community,  at  any  time  and  place,  in  its 
moral  aspect,  we  may  regard  it  as  an  army  on  the 
march  along  a  road  of  life  more  or  less  encompassed  by 
danger.  That,  indeed,  is  scarcely  a  metaphor;  that  is 
what  life,  viewed  in  its  moral  aspect,  may  really  be 
considered.  When  thus  considered,  we  see  that  it  cofi* 
sists  of  an  extremely  small  advance  guard  in  front, 
formed  of  persons  with  a  limited  freedom  of  moral 
action  and  able  to  act  as  patrols  in  various  directions, 
of  a  larger  body  in  the  rear,  in  ancient  military  lan¬ 
guage  called  the  blackguard  and  not  without  its  uses, 
and  in  the  main  of  a  great  compact  majority  with 
which  we  must  always  be  chiefly  concerned  since  they 
really  are  the  army;  they  are  the  community.  What 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS 


245 


we  call  “morals”  is  simply  blind  obedience  to  words 
of  command  —  whether  or  not  issued  by  leaders  the 
army  believes  it  has  itself  chosen  —  of  which  the  sig¬ 
nificance  is  hidden,  and  beyond  this  the  duty  of  keep¬ 
ing  in  step  with  the  others,  or  of  trying  to  keep  in  step, 
or  of  pretending  to  do  so.1  It  is  an  automatic,  almost 
unconscious  process  and  only  becomes  acutely  con¬ 
scious  when  the  individual  is  hopelessly  out  of  step; 
then  he  may  be  relegated  to  the  rear  blackguard.  But 
that  happens  seldom.  So  there  is  little  need  to  be  con¬ 
cerned  about  it.  Even  if  it  happened  very  often,  noth¬ 
ing  overwhelming  would  have  taken  place;  it  would 
merely  be  that  what  we  called  the  blackguard  had  now 
become  the  main  army,  though  with  a  different  dis¬ 
cipline.  We  are,  indeed,  simply  concerned  with  a  dis¬ 
cipline  or  routine  which  in  this  field  is  properly  de¬ 
scribed  as  custom ,  and  the  word  morals  essentially 
means  custom .  That  is  what  morals  must  always  be 
for  the  mass,  and,  indeed,  to  some  extent  for  all,  a 
discipline,  and,  as  we  have  already  seen,  a  discipline 
cannot  properly  be  regarded  as  a  science  or  an  artc 
The  innumerable  books  on  morals,  since  they  have 
usually  confused  and  befogged  this  simple  and  central 

1  What  we  call  crime  is,  at  the  beginning,  usually  an  effort  to  get.  or 
to  pretend  to  get,  into  step,  but,  being  a  violent  or  miscalculated  effort, 
it  is  liable  to  fail,  and  the  criminal  falls  to  the  rear  of  the  social  army. 
“I  believe  that  most  murders  are  really  committed  by  Mrs.  Grundy,”  a 
woman  writes  to  me,  and,  with  the  due  qualification,  the  saying  is  worthy 
of  meditation.  That  is  wrhy  justice  is  impotent  to  prevent  or  even  to 
punish  murder,  for  Mrs.  Grundy  is  within  all  of  us,  being  a  part  of  the 
social  discipline,  and  cannot  be  hanged. 


246 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


fact,  cannot  fail  to  be  rather  unprofitable.  That,  it 
would  seem,  is  what  the  writers  thought  —  at  all 
events  about  those  the  others  had  written  —  or  else 
they  would  not  have  considered  it  necessary  for  them¬ 
selves  to  add  to  the  number.  It  was  not  only  an  un¬ 
profitable  task,  it  was  also  —  except  in  so  far  as  an 
objectively  scientific  attitude  has  been  assumed  — 
aimless.  For,  although  the  morals  of  a  community  at 
one  time  and  place  is  never  the  same  as  that  of  an¬ 
other  or  even  the  same  community  at  another  time 
and  place,  it  is  a  complex  web  of  conditions  that  pro¬ 
duces  the  difference,  and  it  must  have  been  evident 
that  to  attempt  to  affect  it  was  idle.1  There  is  no  occa¬ 
sion  for  any  one  who  is  told  that  he  has  written  a 
“ moral”  book  to  be  unduly  elated,  or  when  he  is  told 
that  his  book  is  “ immoral”  to  be  unduly  cast  down. 
The  significance  of  these  adjectives  is  strictly  limited. 
Neither  the  one  book  nor  the  other  can  have  more  than 
the  faintest  effect  on  the  march  of  the  great  compact 
majority  of  the  social  army. 

Yet,  while  all  this  is  so,  there  is  still  some  interest  in 
the  question  of  morals.  For,  after  all,  there  is  the  small 
body  of  individuals  ahead,  alertly  eager  to  find  the 
road,  with  a  sensitive  flair  for  ail  the  possibilities  the 
future  may  hold.  When  the  compact  majority,  blind 

1  Herbert  Spencer,  writing  to  a  correspondent,  once  well  expressed 
the  harmlessness  —  if  we  choose  so  to  regard  it  —  of  moral  teaching: 
“After  nearly  two  thousand  years’  preaching  of  the  religion  of  amity, 
the  religion  of  enmity  remains  predominant,  and  Europe  is  peopled  b> 
two  hundred  million  pagans,  masquerading  as  Christians,  who  revile 
those  who  wish  them  to  act  on  the  principles  they  profess." 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS  247 

and  automatic  and  unconscious,  follows  after,  to 
tramp  along  the  road  these  pioneers  have  discovered,  it 
may  seem  but  a  dull  road.  But  before  they  reached  it 
that  road  was  interesting,  even  passionately  interest¬ 
ing. 

The  reason  is  that,  for  those  who,  in  any  age,  are 
thus  situated,  life  is  not  merely  a  discipline.  It  is,  or  it 
may  become,  really  an  art. 

IT 

That  living  is  or  may  be  an  art,  and  the  moralist  the 
critic  of  that  art,  is  a  very  ancient  belief.  It  was 
especially  widespread  among  the  Greeks.  To  the 
Greeks,  indeed,  this  belief  was  so  ingrained  and  in¬ 
stinctive  that  it  became  an  implicitly  assumed  attitude 
rather  than  a  definitely  expressed  faith.  It  was  natural 
to  them  to  speak  of  a  virtuous  person  as  we  should 
speak  of  a  beautiful  person.  The  4 ‘good”  was  the 
“beautiful”;  the  sphere  of  ethics  for  the  Greeks  was 
not  distinguished  from  the  sphere  of  aesthetics.  In 
Sophocles,  above  all  poets,  we  gather  the  idea  of  a 
natural  agreement  between  duty  and  inclination 
which  is  at  once  both  beauty  and  moral  order.  But  it  is 
the  beautiful  that  seems  to  be  most  fundamental  in 
to  tcaXov,  which  was  the  noble,  the  honourable,  but 
fundamentally  the  beautiful.  “Beauty  is  the  first  of 
all  things,”  said  Isocrates,  the  famous  orator;  “nothing 
that  is  devoid  of  beauty  is  prized.  .  .  .  The  admiration 
for  virtue  comes  to  this,  that  of  all  manifestation  of 


24.8  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

life,  virtue  is  the  most  beautiful.”  The  supremely 
beautiful  was,  for  the  finer  sort  of  Greeks,  instinctively 
if  not  always  consciously,  the  supremely  divine,  and 
the  Argive  Hera,  it  has  been  said,  ‘‘has  more  divinity 
in  her  countenance  than  any  Madonna  of  them  all.” 
That  is  how  it  came  to  pass  that  we  have  no  word  in 
our  speech  to  apply  to  the  Greek  conception ;  aesthetics 
for  us  is  apart  from  all  the  serious  business  of  life,  and 
the  attempt  to  introduce  it  there  seems  merely  comic. 
But  the  Greeks  spoke  of  life  itself  as  a  craft  or  a  fine 
art.  Protagoras,  who  appears  to-day  as  a  pioneer  of 
modern  science,  was  yet  mainly  concerned  to  regard 
living  as  an  art,  or  as  the  sum  of  many  crafts,  and  the 
Platonic  Socrates,  his  opponent,  still  always  assumed 
that  the  moralist’s  position  is  that  of  a  critic  of  a  craft. 
So  influential  a  moralist  as  Aristotle  remarks  in  a 
matter-of-fact  way,  in  his  “  Poetics,”  that  if  we  wish  to 
ascertain  whether  an  act  is,  or  is  not,  morally  right  we 
must  consider  not  merely  the  intrinsic  quality  of  the 
act,  but  the  person  who  does  it,  the  person  to  whom  it 
is  done,  the  time,  the  means,  the  motive.  Such  an  atti¬ 
tude  towards  life  puts  out  of  court  any  appeal  to  rigid 
moral  laws;  it  meant  that  an  act  must  befit  its  particu¬ 
lar  relationships  at  a  particular  moment,  and  that  its 
moral  value  could,  therefore,  only  be  judged  by  the 
standard  of  the  spectator’s  instinctive  feeling  for  pro¬ 
portion  and  harmony.  That  is  the  attitude  we  adopt 
towards  a  work  of  art. 

It  may  well  appear  strange  to  those  who  cherish  the 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS  249 

modern  idea  of  “aestheticism”  that  the  most  complete 
statement  of  the  Greek  attitude  has  come  down  to  us 
in  the  writings  of  a  philosopher,  an  Alexandrian  Greek 
who  lived  and  taught  in  Rome  in  the  third  century  of 
our  Christian  Era,  when  the  Greek  world  had  van¬ 
ished,  a  religious  mystic,  moreover,  whose  life  and 
teaching  were  penetrated  by  an  austere  ascetic  severity 
which  some  would  count  mediaeval  rather  than  Greek. 1 
It  is  in  Plotinus,  a  thinker  whose  inspiring  influence 
still  lives  to-day,  that  we  probably  find  the  Greek  atti¬ 
tude,  in  its  loftiest  aspect,  best  mirrored,  and  it  was 
probably  through  channels  that  came  from  Plotinus  — 
though  their  source  was  usually  unrecognised  - —  that 
the  Greek  moral  spirit  has  chiefly  reached  modern 
times.  Many  great  thinkers  and  moralists  of  the 
eighteenth  and  nineteenth  centuries,  it  has  been 
claimed,  were  ultimately  indebted  to  Plotinus,  who 
represented  the  only  genuinely  creative  effort  of  the 
Greek  spirit  in  the  third  century.2 

1  But  later  asceticism  was  strictly  the  outcome  of  a  Greek  tendency, 
to  be  traced  in  Plato,  developed  through  Antisthenes,  through  Zeno, 
through  Epictetus,  who  all  desired  to  liberate  the  soul  from  the  bonds  o! 
matter.  The  Neo-Platonists  carried  this  tendency  further,  for  in  their 
time  the  prevailing  anarchy  and  confusion  rendered  the  world  and 
society  less  than  ever  a  fitting  haven  for  the  soul.  It  was  not  Christian¬ 
ity  that  made  the  world  ascetic  (and  there  were  elements  of  hedonism  in 
the  teaching  of  Jesus),  but  the  world  that  made  Christianity  ascetic, 
and  it  was  easy  for  a  Christian  to  become  a  Neo-Platonist,  for  they 
were  both  being  moulded  by  the  same  forces. 

2  Maurice  Croiset  devotes  a  few  luminous  critical  pages  to  Plotinus 
in  the  Croisets’  Histoire  de  la  Litterature  Grecque,  vol.  v,  pp.  820-31.  As 
an  extended  account  of  Plotinus,  from  a  more  enthusiastically  sympa¬ 
thetic  standpoint,  there  are  Dr.  Inge's  well-known  Gifford  Lectures,  The 
Philosophy  of  Plotinus  (1918);  I  may  also  mention  a  careful  scholastic 


250 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


Plotinus  seems  to  have  had  little  interest  in  art,  as 
commonly  understood,  and  he  was  an  impatient,  rapid, 
and  disorderly  writer,  not  even  troubling  to  spell  cor¬ 
rectly.  All  his  art  was  in  the  spiritual  sphere.  It  is 
impossible  to  separate  aesthetics,  as  he  understood  it, 
from  ethics  and  religion.  In  the  beautiful  discourse  on 
Beauty,  which  forms  one  of  the  chapters  of  his  first 
“  Ennead,”  it  is  mainly  with  spiritual  beauty  that  he  is 
concerned.  But  he  insists  that  it  is  beauty,  beauty  of 
the  same  quality  as  that  of  the  physical  world,  which 
inheres  in  goodness,  “nor  may  those  tell  of  the  splen¬ 
dour  of  Virtue  who  have  never  known  the  face  of 
Justice  and  of  Wisdom  beautiful  beyond  the  beauty  of 
Evening  and  of  Dawn.’'  It  is  a  beauty,  he  further 
states,  —  though  here  he  seems  to  be  passing  out  of  the 
purely  aesthetic  sphere,  —  that  arouses  emotions  of 
love.  “This  is  the  spirit  that  Beauty  must  ever  induce, 
wonderment  and  a  delicious  trouble,  longing  and  love, 
and  a  trembling  that  is  also  delight.  For  the  unseen  all 
this  may  be  felt  as  for  the  seen,  and  this  souls  feel  for  it, 
every  soul  in  some  degree,  but  those  the  more  deeply 
who  are  the  more  truly  apt  to  this  higher  love  —  just 
as  all  take  delight  in  the  beauty  of  the  body,  but  ail 
are  not  strung  as  sharply,  and  those  only  that  feel  the 
keener  wound  are  known  as  Lovers.”  Goodness  and 
Truth  were  on  the  same  plane  for  Plotinus  as  Beauty. 
It  may  even  be  said  that  Beauty  was  the  most  funda- 

study,  L' KslhJ’liqtu  de  Ploiin  (1913),  by  Cochez,  of  Louvain,  who  re¬ 
gards  Plotinus  as  the  climax  of  the  objective  aesthetics  of  antiquity  and 
the  beginning  of  the  road  to  modern  subjective  aesthetics. 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS 


251 


mental  of  all,  to  be  identified  ultimately  as  the  Ab¬ 
solute,  as  Reality  itself.  So  it  was  natural  that  in  the 
sphere  of  morals  he  should  speak  indifferently  either  of 
“ extirpating  evil  and  implanting  goodness”  or  of 
“introducing  order  and  beauty  to  replace  goodness” 
—  in  either  case  “we  talk  of  real  things.”  “Virtue  is  a 
natural  concordance  among  the  phenomena  of  the 
soul,  vice  a  discord.”  But  Plotinus  definitely  rejects 
the  notion  that  beauty  is  only  symmetry,  and  so  he 
avoids  the  narrow  conception  of  some  more  modern 
aesthetic  moralists,  notably  Hutcheson.  How,  then,  he 
asks,  could  the  sun  be  beautiful,  or  gold,  or  light,  or 
night,  or  the  stars?  “Beauty  is  something  more  than 
symmetry,  and  symmetry  owes  its  beauty  to  a  remoter 
principle”  —  its  affinity,  in  the  opinion  of  Plotinus, 
with  the  “Ideal  Form,”  immediately  recognised  and 
confirmed  by  the  soul. 

It  may  seem  to  some  that  Plotinus  reduces  to  ab¬ 
surdity  the  conception  of  morality  as  aesthetics,  and  it 
may  well  be  that  the  Greeks  of  the  great  period  were 
wiser  when  they  left  the  nature  of  morals  less  explicit. 
Yet  Plotinus  had  in  him  the  root  of  the  matter.  He  had 
risen  to  the  conception  that  the  moral  life  of  the  soul 
is  a  dance ;  “  Consider  the  performers  in  a  choral  dance : 
they  sing  together,  though  each  one  has  his  own  partic¬ 
ular  part,  and  sometimes  one  voice  is  heard  while  the 
others  are  silent;  and  each  brings  to  the  chorus  some¬ 
thing  of  his  own;  it  is  not  enough  that  all  lift  their 
voices  together;  each  must  sing,  choicely,  his  own  part 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


252 

in  the  music  set  for  him.  So  it  is  with  the  Soul/’1  The 
Hellenic  extension  of  the  aesthetic  emotion,  as  Benn 
pointed  out,  involved  no  weakening  of  the  moral  fibre. 
That  is  so,  we  see,  and  even  emphatically  so,  when  it 
becomes  definitely  explicit  as  in  Plotinus,  and  revolu- 
tionarily  hostile  to  all  those  ideals  of  the  moral  life 
which  most  people  have  been  accustomed  to  consider 
modern. 

As  usually  among  the  Greeks,  it  is  only  implicitly, 
also,  that  we  detect  this  attitude  among  the  Romans, 
the  pupils  of  the  Greeks.  For  the  most  part,  the 
Romans,  whose  impulses  of  art  were  very  limited, 
whose  practical  mind  craved  precision  and  definition, 
proved  rebellious  to  the  idea  that  living  is  an  art ;  yet  it 
may  well  be  that  they  still  retained  that  idea  at  the 
core  of  their  morality.  It  is  interesting  to  note  that  St. 
Augustine,  who  stood  on  the  threshold  between  the 
old  Roman  and  new  Christian  worlds  was  able  to 
write:  “The  art  of  living  well  and  rightly  is  the  defini¬ 
tion  that  the  ancients  give  of  ‘virtue.’”  For  the 
Latins  believed  that  ars  was  derived  from  the  Greek 
word  for  virtue,  aper^2  Yet  there  really  remained 
a  difference  between  the  Greek  and  the  Roman  views 
of  morals.  The  Greek  view,  it  is  universally  admitted, 
was  aesthetic,  in  the  most  definite  sense;  the  Roman 
was  not,  and  when  Cicero  wishes  to  translate  a  Greek 
reference  to  a  “beautiful”  action  it  becomes  an 

1  Ennead,  bk.  in,  chap.  VI.  I  have  mostly  followed  the  translation  of 
Stephen  McKenna. 

*  St.  Augustine,  De  Civitate  Dei ,  bk.  iv,  chap.  xxz. 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS 


253 

“honourable”  action.  The  Greek  was  concerned 
with  what  he  himself  felt  about  his  actions;  the  Roman 
was  concerned  with  what  they  would  look  like  to  other 
people,  and  the  credit,  or  discredit,  that  would  be  re¬ 
flected  back  on  himself. 

The  Hebrews  never  even  dreamed  of  such  an  art. 
Their  attitude  is  sufficiently  embodied  in  the  story  of 
Moses  and  that  visit  to  Sinai  which  resulted  in  the 
production  of  the  table  of  Ten  Commandments  which 
we  may  still  see  inscribed  in  old  churches.  For  even 
our  modern  feeling  about  morals  is  largely  Jewish,  in 
some  measure  Roman,  and  scarcely  Greek  at  all.  We 
still  accept,  in  theory  at  all  events,  the  Mosaic  concep¬ 
tion  of  morality  as  a  code  of  rigid  and  inflexible  rules, 
arbitrarily  ordained,  and  to  be  blindly  obeyed. 

The  conception  of  morality  as  an  art,  which  Chris¬ 
tendom  once  disdained,  seems  now  again  to  be  finding 
favour  in  men’s  eyes.  The  path  has  been  made  smooth 
for  it  by  great  thinkers  of  various  complexion,  who, 
differing  in  many  fundamental  points,  all  alike  assert 
the  relativity  of  truth  and  the  inaptitude  of  rigid 
maxims  to  serve  as  guiding  forces  in  life.  They  also 
assert,  for  a  large  part,  implicitly  or  explicitly,  the 
authority  of  art. 

The  nineteenth  century  was  usually  inspired  by  the 
maxims  of  Kant,  and  lifted  its  hat  reverently  when  it 
heard  Kant  declaiming  his  famous  sayings  concerning 
the  supremacy  of  an  inflexible  moral  law.  Kant  had, 
indeed,  felt  the  stream  of  influence  which  flowed  from 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


254 

Shaftesbury,  and  he  sought  to  mix  up  aesthetics  with 
his  system.  But  he  had  nothing  of  the  genuine  artist’s 
spirit.  The  art  of  morals  was  to  him  a  set  of  maxims, 
cold,  rigid,  precise.  A  sympathetic  biographer  has  said 
of  him  that  the  maxims  were  the  man.  They  are  some¬ 
times  fine  maxims.  But  as  guides,  as  motives  to 
practical  action  in  the  world?  The  maxims  of  the 
valetudinarian  professor  at  Konigsberg  scarcely  seem 
that  to  us  to-day.  Still  less  can  we  harmonise  maxims 
with  art.  Nor  do  we  any  longer  suppose  that  we  are 
impertinent  in  referring  to  the  philosopher’s  person¬ 
ality.  In  the  investigation  of  the  solar  spectrum  per¬ 
sonality  may  count  for  little;  in  the  investigation  of 
moral  laws  it  counts  for  much.  For  personality  is  the 
very  stuff  of  morals.  The  moral  maxims  of  an  elderly 
professor  in  a  provincial  university  town  have  their 
interest.  But  so  have  those  of  a  Casanova.  And  the 
moral  maxims  of  a  Goethe  may  possibly  have  more 
interest  than  either.  There  is  the  rigid  categorical 
imperative  of  Kant;  and  there  is  also  that  other 
dictum,  less  rigid  but  more  reminiscent  of  Greece, 
which  some  well-inspired  person  has  put  into  the 
mouth  of  Walt  Whitman:  ‘‘Whatever  tastes  sweet  to 
the  most  perfect  person,  that  is  finally  right.” 

ill 

Fundamentally  considered,  there  are  two  roads  by 
which  we  may  travel  towards  the  moral  ends  of  life: 
the  road  of  Tradition,  which  is  ultimately  that  of 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS 


255 

Instinct,  pursued  by  the  many,  and  the  road  of  what 
seems  to  be  Reason  —  sought  out  by  the  few.  And  in 
the  end  these  two  roads  are  but  the  same  road,  for 
reason  also  is  an  instinct.  It  is  true  that  the  ingenuity 
of  analytic  investigators  like  Henry  Sidgwick  has  suc¬ 
ceeded  in  enumerating  various  “methods  of  ethics.” 
But,  roughly  speaking,  there  can  only  be  these  two 
main  roads  of  life,  and  only  one  has  proved  supremely 
important.  It  has  been  by  following  the  path  of  tra¬ 
dition  moulded  by  instinct  that  man  reached  the 
threshold  of  civilisation :  whatever  may  have  been  the 
benefits  he  derived  from  the  guidance  of  reason  he 
never  consciously  allowed  reason  to  control  his  moral 
life.  Tables  of  commandments  have  ever  been  “given 
by  God”;  they  represented,  that  is  to  say,  obscure 
impulses  of  the  organism  striving  to  respond  to  practi¬ 
cal  needs.  No  one  dreamed  of  commending  them  by 
declaring  that  they  were  reasonable. 

It  is  clear  how  Instinct  and  Tradition,  thus  working 
together,  act  vitally  and  beneficently  in  moulding  the 
moral  life  of  primitive  peoples.  The  “divine  com¬ 
mand”  was  always  a  command  conditioned  by  the 
special  circumstance  under  which  the  tribe  lived.  That 
is  so  even  when  the  moral  law  is  to  our  civilised  eyes 
“unnatural.”  The  infanticide  of  Polynesian  islanders, 
where  the  means  of  subsistence  and  the  possibilities  of 
expansion  were  limited,  was  obviously  a  necessary 
measure,  beneficent  and  humane  in  its  effects.  The 
killing  of  the  aged  among  the  migrant  Eskimos  was 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


256 

equally  a  necessary  and  kindly  measure,  recognised  as 
such  by  the  victims  themselves,  when  it  was  essential 
that  every  member  of  the  community  should  be  able  to 
help  himself.  Primitive  rules  of  moral  action,  greatly 
as  they  differ  among  themselves,  are  all  more  or  less 
advantageous  and  helpful  on  the  road  of  primitive  life. 
It  is  true  that  they  allow  very  little,  if  any,  scope  for 
divergent  individual  moral  action,  but  that,  too,  was 
advantageous. 

But  that,  also,  is  the  rock  on  which  an  instinctive 
traditional  morality  must  strike  as  civilisation  is  ap¬ 
proached.  The  tribe  has  no  longer  the  same  unity. 
Social  differentiation  has  tended  to  make  the  family  a 
unit,  and  psychic  differentiation  to  make  even  the 
separate  individuals  units.  The  community  of  interests 
of  the  whole  tribe  has  been  broken  up,  and  therewith 
traditional  morality  has  lost  alike  its  value  and  its 
power. 

The  development  of  abstract  intelligence,  which 
coincides  with  civilisation,  works  in  the  same  direction. 
Reason  is,  indeed,  on  one  side  an  integrating  force,  for 
it  shows  that  the  assumption  of  traditional  morality  — • 
the  identity  of  the  individual’s  interests  with  the 
interests  of  the  community  —  is  soundly  based.  But 
it  is  also  a  disintegrating  force.  For  if  it  reveals  a 
general  unity  in  the  ends  of  living,  it  devises  infinitely 
various  and  perplexingly  distracting  excuses  for  living. 
Before  the  active  invasion  of  reason  living  had  been  an 
art,  or  at  all  events  a  discipline,  highly  conventional- 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS 


257 

ised  and  even  ritualistic,  but  the  motive  forces  of  liv¬ 
ing  lay  in  life  itself  and  had  all  the  binding  sanction 
of  instincts;  the  penalty  of  every  failure  in  living, 
it  was  felt,  would  be  swiftly  and  automatically  expe¬ 
rienced.  To  apply  reason  here  was  to  introduce  a 
powerful  solvent  into  morals.  Objectively  it  made 
morality  clearer  but  subjectively  it  destroyed  the  exist¬ 
ing  motives  for  morality;  it  deprived  man,  to  use  the 
fashionable  phraseology  of  the  present  day,  of  a  vital 
illusion. 

Thus  we  have  morality  in  the  fundamental  sense,  the 
actual  practices  of  the  main  army  of  the  population, 
while  in  front  a  variegated  procession  of  prancing 
philosophers  gaily  flaunt  their  moral  theories  before 
the  world.  Kant,  whose  personal  moral  problems 
were  concerned  with  eating  sweetmeats,1  and  other 
philosophers  of  varyingly  inferior  calibre,  were  re¬ 
garded  as  the  lawgivers  of  morality,  though  they  car¬ 
ried  little  enough  weight  with  the  world  at  large. 


1  Kant  was  habitually  cold  and  calm.  But  he  was  very  fond  of  dried 
fruits  and  used  to  have  them  specially  imported  for  him  by  his  friend 
Motherby.  “At  one  time  he  was  eagerly  expecting  a  vessel  with  French 
fruits  which  he  had  ordered,  and  he  had  already  invited  some  friends  to 
a  dinner  at  which  they  were  to  be  served.  The  vessel  was,  hou’ever,  de¬ 
layed  a  number  of  days  by  a  storm.  When  it  arrived,  Kant  was  in¬ 
formed  that  the  provisions  had  become  short  on  account  of  the  delay, 
and  that  the  crew  had  eaten  his  fruit.  Kant  was  so  angry  that  he  de¬ 
clared  they  ought  rather  to  have  starved  than  to  have  touched  it.  Sur¬ 
prised  at  this  irritation,  Motherby  said,  ‘Professor,  you  cannot  be  in 
earnest.’  Kant  answered,  ‘I  am  really  in  earnest,’  and  went  away. 
Afterwards  he  was  sorry.”  (Quoted  by  Stuckenberg,  The  Life,  of  Kant , 
p.  138.)  But  still  it  was  quite  in  accordance  with  Kantian  morality 
that  the  sailors  should  have  starved. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


258 

Thus  it  comes  about  that  abstract  moral  specula¬ 
tions,  culminating  in  rigid  maxims,  are  necessarily 
sterile  and  vain.  They  move  in  the  sphere  of  reason, 
and  that  is  the  sphere  of  comprehension,  but  not  of 
vital  action.  In  this  way  there  arises  a  moral  dualism 
in  civilised  man.  Objectively  he  has  become  like  the 
gods  and  able  to  distinguish  the  ends  of  life;  he  has 
eaten  of  the  fruit  of  the  tree  and  has  knowledge  of  good 
and  evil.  Subjectively  he  is  still  not  far  removed  from 
the  savage,  oftenest  stirred  to  action  by  a  confused 
web  of  emotional  motives,  among  which  the  inter¬ 
woven  strands  of  civilised  reason  are  as  likely  to  pro¬ 
duce  discord  or  paralysis  as  to  furnish  efficient  guides,  a 
state  of  mind  first,  and  perhaps  best,  set  forth  in  its 
extreme  form  by  Shakespeare  in  Hamlet.  On  the  one 
hand  he  cannot  return  to  the  primitive  state  in  which 
all  the  motives  for  living  flowed  harmoniously  in  the 
same  channel ;  he  cannot  divest  himself  of  his  illuminat¬ 
ing  reason ;  he  cannot  recede  from  his  hardly  acquired 
personal  individuality.  On  the  other  hand  he  can 
never  expect,  he  can  never  even  reasonably  hope,  that 
reason  will  ever  hold  in  leash  the  emotions.  It  is  clear 
that  along  neither  path  separately  can  the  civilised 
man  pursue  his  way  in  harmonious  balance  with  him¬ 
self.  We  begin  to  realise  that  what  we  need  is  not  a 
code  of  beautifully  cut-and-dried  maxims  —  whether 
emanating  from  sacred  mountains  or  from  philoso¬ 
phers'  studies — but  a  happy  combination  of  two  differ¬ 
ent  ways  of  living.  We  need,  that  is,  a  traditional 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS 


259 


and  instinctive  way  of  living,  based  on  real  motor  in¬ 
stincts,  which  will  blend  with  reason  and  the  manifold 
needs  of  personality,  instead  of  being  destroyed  by 
their  solvent  actions,  as  rigid  rules  inevitably  are.  Our 
only  valid  rule  is  a  creative  impulse  that  is  one  with 
the  illuminative  power  of  intelligence. 

IV 

At  the  beginning  of  the  eighteenth  century,  the  seed¬ 
time  of  our  modern  ideas,  as  it  has  so  often  seemed  to 
be,  the  English  people,  having  in  art  at  length  brought 
their  language  to  a  fine  degree  of  clarity  and  precision, 
and  having  just  passed  through  a  highly  stimulating 
period  of  dominant  Puritanism  in  life,  became  much 
interested  in  philosophy,  psychology,  and  ethics. 
Their  interest  was,  indeed,  often  superficial  and 
amateurish,  though  they  were  soon  to  produce  some  of 
the  most  notable  figures  in  the  whole  history  of 
thought.  The  third  Earl  of  Shaftesbury,  one  of  the 
earliest  of  the  group,  himself  illustrated  this  unsys¬ 
tematic  method  of  thinking.  He  was  an  amateur,  an 
aristocratic  amateur,  careless  of  consistency,  and  not 
by  any  means  concerned  to  erect  a  philosophic  system. 
Not  that  he  was  a  worse  thinker  on  that  account. 
The  world’s  greatest  thinkers  have  often  been  ama¬ 
teurs;  for  high  thinking  is  the  outcome  of  fine  and 
independent  living,  and  for  that  a  professorial  chair 
offers  no  special  opportunities.  Shaftesbury  was, 
moreover,  a  man  of  fragile  physical  constitution,  as 


26o 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


Kant  was;  but,  unlike  Kant,  he  was  not  a  childish 
hypochondriac  in  seclusion,  but  a  man  in  the  world, 
heroically  seeking  to  live  a  complete  and  harmonious 
life.  By  temperament  he  was  a  Stoic,  and  he  wrote  a 
characteristic  book  of  “  Exercises/'  as  he  proposed  to 
call  what  his  modern  editor  calls  the  “Philosophical 
Regimen,”  in  which  he  consciously  seeks  to  discipline 
himself  in  fine  thinking  and  right  living,  plainly 
acknowledging  that  he  is  the  disciple  of  Epictetus  and 
Marcus  Aurelius.  But  Shaftesbury  was  also  a  man  of 
genius,  and  as  such  it  was  his  good  fortune  to  throw 
afresh  into  the  stream  of  thought  a  fruitful  conception, 
in  part  absorbed,  indeed,  from  Greece,  and  long  im¬ 
plicit  in  men’s  minds,  but  never  before  made  clearly 
recognisable  as  a  moral  theory  and  an  ethical  temper, 
susceptible  of  being  labelled  by  the  philosophic  histo¬ 
rian,  as  it  since  has  been  under  the  name,  passable  no 
doubt  as  any  other,  of  “^Esthetic  Intuitionism.” 

Greek  morality,  it  has  been  well  said,  is  not  a  con¬ 
flict  of  light  and  darkness,  of  good  and  evil,  the  clear 
choice  between  the  broad  road  that  leads  to  destruc¬ 
tion  and  the  narrow  path  of  salvation:  it  is  “an  artistic 
balance  of  light  and  shade.”  Gizycki,  remarking  that 
Shaftesbury  has  more  affinity  to  the  Greeks  than  per¬ 
haps  any  other  modern  moralist,  says  that  “  the  key  lay 
not  only  in  his  head,  but  in  his  heart,  for  like  can  only 
be  recognised  by  like.”  1  We  have  to  remember  at  the 
same  time  that  Shaftesbury  was  really  something  of  a 

*  Georg  von  Gizycki,  Die  Ethik  David  Hume’s,  p.  xi« 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS 


261 


classical  scholar,  even  from  childhood.  Bom  in  1671, 
the  grandson  of  the  foremost  English  statesman  of  his 
time,  the  first  Earl,  Anthony  Cooper,  he  had  the  ad¬ 
vantage  of  the  wise  oversight  of  his  grandfather,  who 
placed  with  him  as  a  companion  in  childhood  a  lady 
who  knew  both  Greek  and  Latin  so  well  that  she  could 
converse  fluently  in  both  languages.  So  it  was  that  by 
the  age  of  eleven  he  was  familiar  with  the  two  classic 
tongues  and  literatures.  That  doubtless  was  also  a  key 
to  his  intimate  feeling  for  the  classic  spirit,  though  it 
would  not  have  sufficed  without  a  native  affinity.  He 
became  the  pupil  of  Locke,  and  at  fifteen  he  went  to 
Italy,  to  spend  a  considerable  time  there.  He  knew 
France  also,  and  the  French  tongue,  so  well  that  he 
was  often  taken  for  a  native.  He  lived  for  some  time  in 
Holland,  and  there  formed  a  friendship  with  Bayle, 
which  began  before  the  latter  was  aware  of  his  friend’s 
rank  and  lasted  till  Bayle’s  death.  In  Holland  he  may 
have  been  slightly  influenced  by  Grotius.1  Shaftesbury 
was  not  of  robust  constitution ;  he  suffered  from  asth¬ 
ma,  and  his  health  was  further  affected  by  his  zeal  in 
public  affairs  as  well  as  his  enthusiasm  in  study,  for  his 
morality  was  not  that  of  a  recluse,  but  of  a  man  who 
played  an  active  part  in  life,  not  only  in  social  benevo¬ 
lence,  like  his  descendant  the  enlightened  philanthropic 
Earl  of  the  nineteenth  century,  but  in  the  establish¬ 
ment  of  civil  freedom  and  toleration.  Locke  wrote  of 
his  pupil  (who  was  not,  however,  in  agreement  with  hia 
1  F.  C.  Sharp,  Mind  (1912),  p.  38$, 


262 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


tutor's  philosophic  standpoint,1  though  he  always 
treated  him  with  consideration)  that  “the  sword  was 
too  sharp  for  the  scabbard." 

“He  seems,"  wrote  of  Shaftesbury  his  unfriendly 
contemporary  Mandeville,  “to  require  and  expect 
goodness  in  his  species  as  we  do  a  sweet  taste  in  grapes 
and  China  oranges,  of  which,  if  any  of  them  are  sour, 
we  boldly  pronounce  that  they  are  not  come  to  that 
perfection  their  nature  is  capable  of."  In  a  certain 
sense  this  was  correct.  Shaftesbury,  it  has  been  said, 
was  the  father  of  that  new  ethics  which  recognises 
that  Nature  is  not  a  mere  impulse  of  self-preservation, 
as  Hobbes  thought,  but  also  a  racial  impulse,  having 
regard  to  others;  there  are  social  inclinations  in  the 
individual,  he  realised,  that  go  beyond  individual  ends. 
(Referring  to  the  famous  dictum  of  Hobbes,  Homo 
homini  lupus ,  he  observes:  “To  say  in  disparagement 
of  Man  ‘that  he  is  to  Man  a  wolf'  appears  somewhat 
absurd  when  one  considers  that  wolves  are  to  wolves 
very  kind  and  loving  creatures.")  Therewith  “good¬ 
ness"  was  seen,  virtually  for  the  first  time  in  the 
modern  period,  to  be  as  “natural"  as  the  sweetness  of 
ripe  fruit. 

There  was  another  reason,  a  fundamental  physi¬ 
ological  and  psychological  reason,  why  “goodness"  of 
actions  and  the  “sweetness"  of  fruits  are  equally 

1  Shaftesbury  held  that  Locke  swept  away  too  much  and  failed  ta 
allow  for  inborn  instincts  (or  “senses,”  as  he  sometimes  called  them*) 
developing  naturally.  We  now  see  that  he  was  right. 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS  263 

natural,  a  reason  that  would,  no  doubt,  have  been 
found  strange  both  by  Mandeville  and  Shaftesbury. 
Morality,  Shaftesbury  describes  as  “the  taste  of 
beauty  and  the  relish  of  what  is  decent,”  and  the 
“sense  of  beauty”  is  ultimately  the  same  as  the 
“moral  sense.”  “My  first  endeavour,”  wrote  Shaftes¬ 
bury,  “must  be  to  distinguish  the  true  taste  of  fruits, 
refine  my  palate,  and  establish  a  just  relish  in  the 
kind.”  He  thought,  evidently,  that  he  was  merely 
using  a  metaphor.  But  he  was  speaking  essentially  in 
the  direct,  straightforward  way  of  natural  and  primi¬ 
tive  Man.  At  the  foundation,  “sweetness”  and  “good¬ 
ness”  are  the  same  thing.  That  can  still  be  detected  in 
the  very  structure  of  language,  not  only  of  primitive 
languages,  but  those  of  the  most  civilised  peoples. 
That  morality  is,  in  the  strict  sense,  a  matter  of  taste, 
of  aesthetics,  of  what  the  Greeks  called  ala6^<TL^}  is 
conclusively  shown  by  the  fact  that  in  the  most  widely 
separated  tongues  —  possibly  wherever  the  matter  has 
been  carefully  investigated  —  moral  goodness  is,  at 
the  outset,  expressed  in  terms  of  taste .  What  is  good  is 
what  is  sweet ,  and  sometimes,  also,  salt.1  Primitive 
peoples  have  highly  developed  the  sensory  side  of  their 
mental  life,  and  their  vocabularies  bear  witness  to  the 
intimate  connection  of  sensations  of  taste  and  touch 
with  emotional  tone.  There  is,  indeed,  no  occasion  to 

1  There  is  no  need  to  refer  to  the  value  of  salt,  and  therefore  the  ap¬ 
preciation  of  the  flavour  of  salt,  to  primitive  people.  Still  to-day,  in 
Spain,  sal  (salt)  is  popularly  used  for  a  more  or  less  intellectual  and 
moral  Quality  which  is  highly  admired. 


264 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


go  beyond  our  own  European  traditions  to  see  that  the 
expression  of  moral  qualities  is  based  on  fundamental 
sensory  qualities  of  taste.  In  Latin  suavis  is  sweet ,  but 
even  in  Latin  it  became  a  moral  quality,  and  its 
English  derivatives  have  been  entirely  deflected  from 
physical  to  moral  qualities,  while  bitter  is  at  once  a 
physical  quality  and  a  poignantly  moral  quality.  In 
Sanskrit  and  Persian  and  Arabic  salt  is  not  only  a 
physical  taste  but  the  name  for  lustre  and  grace  and 
beauty.1  It  seems  well  in  passing  to  point  out  that  the 
deeper  we  penetrate  the  more  fundamentally  we  find 
the  aesthetic  conception  of  morals  grounded  in  Nature. 
But  not  every  one  cares  to  penetrate  any  deeper  and 
there  is  no  need  to  insist. 

Shaftesbury  held  that  human  actions  should  have 
a  beauty  of  symmetry  and  proportion  and  harmony, 
which  appeal  to  us,  not  because  they  accord  with  any 
rule  or  maxim  (although  they  may  conceivably  be 
susceptible  of  measurement),  but  because  they  satisfy 
our  instinctive  feelings,  evoking  an  approval  which  is 
strictly  an  aesthetic  judgment  of  moral  action.  This 
instinctive  judgment  was  not,  as  Shaftesbury  under¬ 
stood  it,  a  guide  to  action.  He  held,  rightly  enough, 
that  the  impulse  to  action  is  fundamental  and  primary, 
that  fine  action  is  the  outcome  of  finely  tempered 
natures.  It  is  a  feeling  for  the  just  time  and  measure  of 

1  Dr.  C.  S.  Myers  has  touched  on  thi3  point  in  Reports  of  the  Cam¬ 
bridge  Anthropological  Expedition  to  Torres  Straits ,  vol.  u,  part  n,  chap, 
iv ;  also  “The  Taste-Names  of  Primitive  Peoples,”  British  Journal  oj 
Psychology ,  June,  1904. 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS  265 

human  passion,  and  maxims  are  useless  to  him  whose 
nature  is  ill-balanced.  “Virtue  is  no  other  than  the 
love  of  order  and  beauty  in  society.”  /Esthetic  appre¬ 
ciation  of  the  act,  and  even  an  ecstatic  pleasure  in  it, 
are  part  of  our  aesthetic  delight  in  Nature  generally, 
which  includes  Man.  Nature,  it  is  clear,  plays  a  large 
part  in  this  conception  of  the  moral  life.  To  lack 
balance  on  any  plane  of  moral  conduct  is  to  be  un¬ 
natural;  “Nature  is  not  mocked,”  said  Shaftesbury. 
She  is  a  miracle,  for  miracles  are  not  things  that  are 
performed,  but  things  that  are  perceived,  and  to  fail 
here  is  to  fail  in  perception  of  the  divinity  of  Nature,  to 
do  violence  to  her,  and  to  court  moral  destruction.  A 
return  to  Nature  is  not  a  return  to  ignorance  or  sav¬ 
agery,  but  to  the  first  instinctive  feeling  for  the  beauty 
of  well-proportioned  affections.  “The  most  natural 
beauty  in  the  world  is  honesty  and  moral  truth,”  he 
asserts,  and  he  recurs  again  and  again  to  “the  beauty 
of  honesty.”  “  Dulce  et  decorum  est  was  his  sole  reason,” 
he  says  of  the  classical  pagan,  adding:  “And  this  is  still 
a  good  reason.”  In  learning  how  to  act,  he  thought, 
we  are  “learning  to  become  artists.”  It  seems  natural 
to  him  to  refer  to  the  magistrate  as  an  artist;  “the 
magistrate,  if  he  be  an  artist,”  he  incidentally  says. 
We  must  not  make  morality  depend  on  authority. 
The  true  artist,  in  any  art,  will  never  act  below  his 
character.  “Let  who  will  make  it  for  you  as  you 
fancy,”  the  artist  declares;  “I  know  it  to  be  wrong. 
Whatever  I  have  made  hitherto  has  been  true  work. 


266 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


And  neither  for  your  sake  or  anybody’s  else  shall  I 
put  my  hand  to  any  other.”  “This  is  virtue!”  ex¬ 
claims  Shaftesbury.  “This  disposition  transferred  to 
the  whole  of  life  perfects  a  character.  For  there  is  a 
workmanship  and  a  truth  in  actions.” 

Shaftesbury,  it  may  be  repeated,  was  an  amateur, 
not  only  in  philosophy,  but  even  in  the  arts.  He  re¬ 
garded  literature  as  one  of  the  schoolmasters  for  fine 
living,  yet  he  has  not  been  generally  regarded  as  a  fine 
artist  in  writing,  though,  directly  or  indirectly,  he 
helped  to  inspire  not  only  Pope,  but  Thomson  and 
Cowper  and  Wordsworth.  He  was  inevitably  inter¬ 
ested  in  painting,  but  his  tastes  were  merely  those  of 
the  ordinary  connoisseur  of  his  time.  This  gives  a 
certain  superficiality  to  his  general  aesthetic  vision, 
though  it  was  far  from  true,  as  the  theologians  sup¬ 
posed,  that  he  was  lacking  in  seriousness.  His  chief 
immediate  followers,  like  Hutcheson,  came  out  of 
Calvinistic  Puritanism.  He  was  himself  an  austere 
Stoic  who  adapted  himself  to  the  tone  of  the  well-bred 
world  he  lived  in.  But  if  an  amateur,  he  was  an 
amateur  of  genius.  He  threw  a  vast  and  fruitful  con¬ 
ception —  caught  from  the  “Poetics”  of  Aristotle, 
“the  Great  Master  of  Arts,”  and  developed  with  fine 
insight  —  into  our  modern  world.  Most  of  the  great 
European  thinkers  of  the  eighteenth  and  early  nine¬ 
teenth  centuries  were  in  some  measure  inspired,  influ¬ 
enced,  or  anticipated  by  Shaftesbury.  Even  Kant, 
though  he  was  unsympathetic  and  niggardly  of  appre- 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS 


267 


ciation,  helped  to  develop  the  conception  Shaftesbury 
first  formulated.  To-day  we  see  it  on  every  hand.  It  is 
slowly  and  subtly  moulding  the  whole  of  our  modern 
morality. 

“The  greatest  Greek  of  modern  times”  —  so  he  ap¬ 
pears  to  those  who  study  his  work  to-day.  It  is  through 
Shaftesbury,  and  Shaftesbury  alone  that  Greek  mor¬ 
als,  in  their  finest  essence,  have  been  a  vivifying 
influence  in  our  modern  world.  Georg  von  Gizycki, 
who  has  perhaps  most  clearly  apprehended  Shaftes¬ 
bury’s  place  in  morals,  indicates  that  place  with  preci¬ 
sion  and  justice  when  he  states  that  “he  furnished  the 
elements  of  a  moral  philosophy  which  fits  into  the  frame 
of  a  truly  scientific  conception  of  the  world.”  1  That 
was  a  service  to  the  modern  world  so  great  and  so  dar¬ 
ing  that  it  could  scarcely  meet  with  approval  from  his 
fellow  countrymen.  The  more  keenly  philosophical 
Scotch,  indeed,  recognised  him,  first  of  all  Hume,  and 
he  was  accepted  and  embodied  as  a  kind  of  founder  by 
the  so-called  Scottish  School,  though  so  toned  down 
and  adulterated  and  adapted  to  popular  tastes  and 
needs,  that  in  the  end  he  was  thereby  discredited.  But 
the  English  never  even  adulterated  him;  they  clung 
to  the  antiquated  and  eschatological  Paley,  bringing 
forth  edition  after  edition  of  his  works  whereon  to 
discipline  their  youthful  minds.  That  led  naturally  on 
to  the  English  Utilitarians  in  morality,  who  would  dis- 

1  Dr.  Georg  von  Gizycki,  Die  Philosophic  Shaftesbury’s  (1876);  and 
the  same  author's  Die  Ethik  Da&id  Hume's  (1878). 


268 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


dain  to  look  at  anything  that  could  be  called  Greek, 
Sir  Leslie  Stephen,  who  was  the  vigorous  and  capable 
interpreter  to  the  general  public  of  Utilitarianism, 
could  see  nothing  good  whatever  in  Shaftesbury;  he 
viewed  him  with  contemptuous  pity  and  could  only 
jiurmur:  4 ‘Poor  Shaftesbury !” 

Meanwhile  Shaftesbury’s  fame  had  from  the  first 
been  pursuing  a  very  different  course  in  France  and 
Germany,  for  it  is  the  people  outside  a  man’s  own 
country  who  anticipate  the  verdict  of  posterity.  Leib¬ 
nitz,  whose  vast  genius  was  on  some  sides  akin  (Shaftes¬ 
bury  has,  indeed,  been  termed  “the  Leibnitz  of  mor¬ 
als”),  admired  the  English  thinker,  and  the  universal 
Voltaire  recognised  him.  Montesquieu  placed  him  on 
a  four-square  summit  with  Plato  and  Montaigne  and 
Malebranche.  The  enthusiastic  Diderot,  seeing  in 
Shaftesbury  the  exponent  of  the  naturalistic  ethics  of 
his  own  temperament,  translated  a  large  part  of  his 
chief  book  in  1745.  Herder,  who  inspired  so  many  of 
the  chief  thinkers  of  the  nineteenth  century  and  even  of 
to-day,  was  himself  largely  inspired  by  Shaftesbury, 
whom  he  once  called  “the  virtuoso  of  humanity,” 
regarding  his  writings  as,  even  in  form,  well-nigh 
worthy  of  Greek  antiquity,  and  long  proposed  to  make 
a  comparative  study  of  the  ethical  conceptions  of 
Spinoza,  Leibnitz,  and  Shaftesbury,  but  unfortunately 
never  carried  out  that  happy  idea.  Rousseau,  not  only 
by  contact  of  ideas,  but  the  spontaneous  effort  of  his 
own  nature  towards  autonomous  harmony,  was  in 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS 


269 


touch  with  Shaftesbury,  and  so  helped  to  bring  his 
ideals  into  the  general  stream  of  modern  life.  Shaftes¬ 
bury,  directly  or  indirectly,  inspired  the  early  influ¬ 
ential  French  Socialists  and  Communists.  On  the 
other  hand  he  has  equally  inspired  the  moralists  of 
individualism.  Even  the  Spanish-American  Rod6, 
one  of  the  most  delicately  aristocratic  of  modern 
moralists  in  recent  time,  puts  forth  conceptions,  which, 
consciously  or  unconsciously,  are  precisely  those  of 
Shaftesbury.  Rod6  believes  that  all  moral  evil  is  a 
dissonance  in  the  aesthetic  of  conduct  and  that  the 
moral  task  in  character  is  that  of  the  sculptor  in 
marble:  “Virtue  is  a  kind  of  art,  a  divine  art.”  Even 
Croce,  who  began  by  making  a  deep  division  between 
art  and  life,  holds  that  there  can  be  no  great  critic  of 
art  who  is  not  also  a  great  critic  of  life,  for  aesthetic 
criticism  is  really  itself  a  criticism  of  life,  and  his  whole 
philosophy  may  be  regarded  as  representing  a  stage  of 
transition  between  the  old  traditional  view  of  the 
world  and  that  conception  towards  which  in  the  mod¬ 
ern  world  our  gaze  is  turned.1 

As  Shaftesbury  had  stated  the  matter,  however,  it 
was  left  on  the  whole  vague  and  large.  He  made  no 
very  clear  distinction  between  the  creative  artistic 
impulse  in  life  and  critical  aesthetic  appreciation.  In 
the  sphere  of  morals  we  must  often  be  content  to  wait 

1  It  should  be  added  that  Croce  is  himself  moving  in  this  direction, 
and  in,  for  instance,  11  Caratlerc  di  1  oluhid  della  Espressione  Artistica 
fi 917),  he  recognises  the  universality  of  art. 


270 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


until  our  activity  is  completed  to  appreciate  its  beauty 
or  its  ugliness.1  On  the  background  of  general  aesthetic 
judgment  we  have  to  concentrate  on  the  forces  of 
creative  artistic  activity,  whose  work  it  is  painfully  to 
mould  the  clay  of  moral  action,  and  forge  its  iron,  long 
before  the  aesthetic  criterion  can  be  applied  to  the  final 
product.  The  artist’s  work  in  life  is  full  of  struggle  and 
toil ;  it  is  only  the  spectator  of  morals  who  can  assume 
the  calm  aesthetic  attitude.  Shaftesbury,  indeed,  evi¬ 
dently  recognised  this,  but  it  was  not  enough  to  say,  as 
he  said,  that  we  may  prepare  ourselves  for  moral 
action  by  study  in  literature.  One  may  be  willing 
to  regard  living  as  an  art,  and  yet  be  of  opinion 
that  it  is  as  unsatisfactory  to  learn  the  art  of  living 
in  literature  as  to  learn,  let  us  say,  the  art  of  music  in 
architecture. 

Yet  we  must  not  allow  these  considerations  to  lead 
us  away  from  the  great  fact  that  Shaftesbury  clearly 
realised  —  what  modern  psychology  emphasises  — 
that  desires  can  only  be  countered  by  desires,  that 
reason  cannot  affect  appetite.  4 ‘That  which  is  of 
original  and  pure  nature,”  he  declared,  “  nothing 
besides  contrary  habit  and  custom  (a  second  nature)  is 
able  to  displace.  There  is  no  speculative  opinion, 
persuasion,  or  belief,  which  is  capable  immediately  or 
directly  to  exclude  or  destroy  it.”  Where  he  went 

1  Stanley  Hall  remarks  in  criticising  Kant’s  moral  aesthetics:  “The 
beauty  of  virtue  is  only  seen  in  contemplating  it  and  the  act  of  doing 
it  has  no  beauty  to  the  doer  at  the  moment.”  (G.  Stanley  Hall,  “Why 
Kant  is  Passing,”  American  Journal  of  Psychology ,  July,  1912.) 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS  27s 

beyxmd  some  modern  psychologists  is  in  his  Hellenic 
perception  that  in  this  sphere  of  instinct  we  are  amid 
the  play  of  art  to  which  aesthetic  criteria  alone  can  be 
applied. 

It  was  necessary  to  concentrate  and  apply  these 
large  general  ideas.  To  some  extent  this  was  done  by 
Shaftesbury’s  immediate  successors  and  followers,  such 
as  Hutcheson  and  Arbuckle,  who  taught  that  man  is, 
ethically,  an  artist  whose  work  is  his  own  life.  They 
concentrated  attention  on  the  really  creative  aspects  of 
the  artist  in  life,  aesthetic  appreciation  of  the  finished 
product  being  regarded  as  secondary.  For  all  art  is, 
primarily,  not  a  contemplation,  but  a  doing,  a  creative 
action,  and  morality  is  so  preeminently. 

Shaftesbury,  with  his  followers  Arbuckle  and  Hutch¬ 
eson,  may  be  regarded  as  the  founders  of  aesthetics;  it 
was  Hutcheson,  though  he  happened  to  be  the  least 
genuinely  aesthetic  in  temperament  of  the  three,  who 
wrote  the  first  modern  treatise  on  aesthetics.  To¬ 
gether,  also,  they  may  be  said  to  have  been  the  re¬ 
vivalists  of  Hellenism,  that  is  to  say,  of  the  Hellenic 
spirit,  or  rather  of  the  classic  spirit,  for  it  often  came 
through  Roman  channels.  Shaftesbury  was,  as  Eucken 
has  well  said,  the  Greek  spirit  among  English  thinkers. 
He  represented  an  inevitable  reaction  against  Puritan¬ 
ism,  a  reaction  which  is  still  going  on  —  indeed,  here 
and  there  only  just  beginning.  As  Puritanism  had 
achieved  so  notable  a  victory  in  England,  it  was 
natural  that  in  England  the  first  great  champion  of 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


272 

Hellenism  should  appear.  It  is  to  Oliver  Cromwell  and 
Praise-God  Barebones  that  we  owe  Shaftesbury. 

After  Shaftesbury  it  is  Arbuckle  who  first  deserves 
attention,  though  he  wrote  so  little  that  he  never 
attained  the  prominence  he  deserved.1  He  was  a 
Dublin  physician  of  Scottish  ancestry,  the  friend  of 
Swift,  by  whom  he  was  highly  esteemed,  and  he  was 
a  cripple  from  boyhood.  He  was  a  man  of  genuine 
artistic  temperament,  though  the  art  he  was  attracted 
to  was  not,  as  with  Shaftesbury,  the  sculptor’s  or  the 
painter’s,  but  the  poet’s.  It  was  not  so  much  intuition 
on  which  he  insisted,  but  imagination  as  formative  of  a 
character;  moral  approval  seemed  to  him  thoroughly 
aesthetic,  part  of  an  imaginative  act  which  framed  the 
ideal  of  a  beautiful  personality,  externalising  itself  in 
action.  When  Robert  Bridges,  the  poet  of  our  own 
time,  suggests  (in  his  “ Necessity  of  Poetry”)  that 
“  morals  is  that  part  of  Poetry  which  deals  with  con¬ 
duct,”  he  is  speaking  in  the  spirit  of  Arbuckle.  An 
earlier  and  greater  poet  was  still  nearer  to  Arbuckle. 
“A  man  to  be  greatly  good,”  said  Shelley  in  his  “ De¬ 
fence  of  Poetry,”  “must  imagine  intensely  and  com¬ 
prehensively.  .  .  .  The  great  instrument  of  moral  good 
is  the  imagination.”  If,  indeed,  with  Adam  Smith  and 
Schopenhauer,  we  choose  to  base  morals  on  sympathy 
we  really  are  thereby  making  the  poet’s  imagination 
the  great  moral  instrument.  Morals  was  for  Arbuckle 
a  disinterested  aesthetic  harmony,  and  he  had  caught 
much  of  the  genuine  Greek  spirit. 

1  See  article  on  Arbuckle  by  W.  R.  Scott  in  Mind ,  April,  1899. 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS 


*73 


Hutcheson  was  in  this  respect  less  successful. 
Though  he  had  occupied  himself  with  aesthetics  he  had 
little  true  aesthetic  feeling ;  and  though  he  accomplished 
much  for  the  revival  of  Greek  studies  his  own  sym¬ 
pathies  were  really  with  the  Roman  Stoics,  with 
Cicero,  with  Marcus  Aurelius,  and  in  this  way  he  was 
led  towards  Christianity,  to  which  Shaftesbury  was 
really  alien.  He  democratised  if  not  vulgarised,  and 
diluted  if  not  debased,  Shaftesbury’s  loftier  concep¬ 
tion.  In  his  too  widely  sympathetic  and  receptive 
mind  the  Shaftesburian  ideal  was  not  only  Romanised, 
not  only  Christianised;  it  was  plunged  into  a  mis¬ 
cellaneously  eclectic  mass  that  often  became  incon¬ 
sistent  and  incoherent.  In  the  long  run,  in  spite  of  his 
great  immediate  success,  he  injured  in  these  ways  the 
cause  he  advocated.  He  overemphasised  the  passively 
aesthetic  side  of  morals;  he  dwelt  on  the  term  “moral 
sense,”  by  Shaftesbury  only  occasionally  used,  as  it 
had  long  previously  been  by  Aristotle  (and  then  only 
in  the  sense  of  “natural  temper”  by  analogy  with  the 
physical  senses),  and  this  term  was  long  a  stumbling- 
block  in  the  eyes  of  innocent  philosophic  critics,  too 
easily  befooled  by  words,  who  failed  to  see  that,  as 
Libby  has  pointed  out,  the  underlying  idea  simply 
is,  as  held  by  Shaftesbury,  that  aesthetic  notions  of 
proportion  and  symmetry  depend  upon  the  native 
structure  of  the  mind  and  only  so  constitute  a  “moral 
sense.”  1  What  Hutcheson,  as  distinct  from  Shaftes- 

1  See  a  helpful  paper  by  M.  F.  Libby,  “  Influence  of  the  Idea  of  ^Esthetic 


274 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


bury,  meant  by  a  “moral  sense”  —  really  a  conative 
instinct  —  is  sufficiently  indicated  by  the  fact  that  he 
was  inclined  to  consider  the  conjugal  and  parental 
affections  as  a  “sense”  because  natural.  He  desired 
to  shut  out  reason,  and  cognitive  elements,  and  that 
again  brought  him  to  the  conception  of  morality  as 
instinctive.  Hutcheson’s  conception  of  “sense”  was 
defective  as  being  too  liable  to  be  regarded  as  passive 
rather  than  as  conative,  though  conation  was  implied. 
The  fact  that  the  “moral  sense”  was  really  instinct, 
and  had  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  “innate  ideas,” 
as  many  have  ignorantly  supposed,  was  clearly  seen  by 
Hutcheson’s  opponents.  The  chief  objection  brought 
forward  by  the  Reverend  John  Balguy  in  1728,  in  the 
first  part  of  his  “Foundation  of  Moral  Goodness,” 
was  precisely  that  Hutcheson  based  morality  on  in¬ 
stinct  and  so  had  allowed  “some  degree  of  morality  to 
animals.”  1  It  was  Hutcheson’s  fine  and  impressive 
personality,  his  high  character,  his  eloquence,  his 
influential  position,  which  enabled  him  to  keep  alive 
the  conception  of  morals  he  preached,  and  even  to  give 
it  an  effective  force,  throughout  the  European  world, 
it  might  not  otherwise  easily  have  exerted.  Philosophy 

Proportion  on  the  Ethics  of  Shaftesbury,”  American  Journal  of  Psy¬ 
chology ,  May-October,  1901. 

1  We  find  fallacious  criticism  of  the  “moral  sense”  down  to  almost 
recent  times,  in,  for  instance,  McDougaU’s  Social  Psychology ,  even 
though  McDougall,  by  his  insistence  on  the  instinctive  basis  of  morality, 
was  himself  carrying  on  the  tradition  of  Shaftesbury  and  Hutcheson. 
But  McDougall  also  dragged  in  “some  prescribed  code  of  conduct,” 
though  he  neglected  to  mention  who  is  to  “prescribe”  it. 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS 


275 


was  to  Hutcheson  the  art  of  living  —  as  it  was  to  the 
old  Greek  philosophers  —  rather  than  a  question  of 
metaphysics,  and  he  was  careless  of  consistency  in 
thinking,  an  open-minded  eclectic  who  insisted  that 
life  itself  is  the  great  matter.  That,  no  doubt,  was  the 
reason  why  he  had  so  immense  an  influence.  It  was 
mainly  through  Hutcheson  that  the  more  aristocratic 
spirit  of  Shaftesbury  was  poured  into  the  circulatory 
channels  of  the  world’s  life.  Hume  and  Adam  Smith 
and  Reid  were  either  the  pupils  of  Hutcheson  or 
directly  influenced  by  him.  He  was  a  great  personality 
rather  than  a  great  thinker,  and  it  was  as  such  that  he 
exerted  so  much  force  in  philosophy.1 

With  Schiller,  whose  attitude  was  not,  however, 
based  directly  on  Shaftesbury,  the  aesthetic  conception 
of  morals,  which  in  its  definitely  conscious  form  had  up 
till  then  been  especially  English,  may  be  said  to  have 
entered  the  main  stream  of  culture.  Schiller  regarded 
the  identity  of  Duty  and  Inclination  as  the  ideal  goal 
of  human  development,  and  looked  on  the  Genius  of 
Beauty  as  the  chief  guide  of  life.  Wilhelm  von  Hum¬ 
boldt,  one  of  the  greatest  spirits  of  that  age,  was  moved 
by  the  same  ideas,  throughout  his  life,  much  as  in 
many  respects  he  changed,  and  even  shortly  before  his 
death  wrote  in  deprecation  of  the  notion  that  con¬ 
formity  to  duty  is  the  final  aim  of  morality.  Goethe, 
who  was  the  intimate  friend  of  both  Schiller  and  Hum- 

1  See  W.  R.  Scott,  Francis  Hutcheson :  His  Life,  Teaching  and  Position 

in  the  History  of  Philosophy.  (1900.) 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


276 

boldt,  largely  shared  the  same  attitude,  and  through 
him  it  has  had  a  subtle  and  boundless  influence.  Kant, 
who,  it  has  been  said,  mistook  Duty  for  a  Prussian 
drill-sergeant,  still  ruled  the  academic  moral  world. 
But  a  new  vivifying  and  moulding  force  had  entered 
the  larger  moral  world,  and  to-day  we  may  detect  its 
presence  on  every  side. 


V 

It  has  often  been  brought  against  the  conception  of 
morality  as  an  art  that  it  lacks  seriousness.  It  seems  to 
many  people  to  involve  an  easy,  self-indulgent,  dilet¬ 
tante  way  of  looking  at  life.  Certainly  it  is  not  the  way 
of  the  Old  Testament.  Except  in  imaginative  litera¬ 
ture  —  it  was,  indeed,  an  enormous  and  fateful  excep¬ 
tion  —  the  Hebrews  were  no  “aesthetic  intuitionists.” 
They  hated  art,  for  the  rest,  and  in  face  of  the  prob¬ 
lems  of  living  they  were  not  in  the  habit  of  considering 
the  lilies  how  they  grow.  It  was  not  the  beauty  of 
holiness,  but  the  stern  rod  of  a  jealous  Jehovah,  which 
they  craved  for  their  encouragement  along  the  path  of 
Duty.  And  it  is  the  Hebrew  mode  of  feeling  which  has 
been,  more  or  less  violently  and  imperfectly,  grafted 
into  our  Christianity.1 

1  It  is  noteworthy,  however,  that  the  aesthetic  view  of  morals  has  had 
advocates,  not  only  among  the  more  latitudinarian  Protestants,  but  in 
Catholicism.  A  few  years  ago  the  Reverend  Dr.  Kolbe  published  a  book 
on  The  Art  of  Life,  designed  to  show  that  just  as  the  sculptor  works  with 
hammer  and  chisel  to  shape  a  block  of  marble  into  a  form  of  beauty,  so 
Man,  by  the  power  of  grace,  the  illumination  of  faith,  and  the  instru¬ 
ment  of  prayer,  works  to  transform  his  soul.  But  this  simile  of  the 
sculptor,  which  has  appealed  so  strongly  alike  to  Christian  and  anti- 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS 


277 


It  is  a  complete  mistake,  however,  to  suppose  that 
those  for  whom  life  is  an  art  have  entered  on  an  easy 
path,  with  nothing  but  enjoyment  and  self-indulgence 
before  them.  The  reverse  is  nearer  to  the  truth.  It  is 
probably  the  hedonist  who  had  better  choose  rules  if  he 
only  cares  to  make  life  pleasant.1  For  the  artist  life  is 
always  a  discipline,  and  no  discipline  can  be  without 
pain.  That  is  so  even  of  dancing,  which  of  all  the  arts 
is  most  associated  in  the  popular  mind  with  pleasure. 
To  learn  to  dance  is  the  most  austere  of  disciplines,  and 
even  for  those  who  have  attained  to  the  summit  of  its 
art  often  remains  a  discipline  not  to  be  exercised  with¬ 
out  heroism.  The  dancer  seems  a  thing  of  joy,  but  we 
are  told  that  this  famous  dancer’s  slippers  are  filled 
with  blood  when  the  dance  is  over,  and  that  one  falls 
down  pulseless  and  deathlike  on  leaving  the  stage,  and 
the  other  must  spend  the  day  in  darkness  and  silence. 
11  It  is  no  small  advantage,”  said  Nietzsche,  “  to  have  a 
hundred  Damoclean  swords  suspended  above  one’s 
head ;  that  is  how  one  learns  to  dance,  that  is  how  one 
attains  ‘freedom  of  movement/”  a 

Christian  moralists,  proceeds,  whether  or  not  they  knew  it,  from  Plo¬ 
tinus,  who,  in  his  famous  chapter  on  Beauty,  bids  us  note  the  sculptor. 
“He  cuts  away  here,  he  smooths  there,  he  makes  this  line  lighter,  this 
other  purer,  until  a  living  face  has  grown  upon  his  work.  So  do  you  also 
cut  away  all  that  is  excessive,  straighten  all  that  is  crooked,  bring  light 
to  all  that  is  overcast,  make  all  one  glow  of  beauty,  and  never  cease 
chiselling  your  statue  until  the  godlike  splendour  shines  on  you  from  it, 
and  the  perfect  goodness  stands,  surely,  in  the  stainless  shrine.” 

1  “They  who  pitched  the  goal  of  their  aspiration  so  high  knew  that 
the  paths  leading  up  to  it  were  rough  and  steep  and  long,”  remarks 
A.  W.  Benn  ( The  Greek  Philosophers ,  1914,  p.  57);  “they  said  ‘the  beauti¬ 
ful  is  hard’  —  hard  to  judge,  hard  to  win,  hard  to  keep.” 

1  Der  Wille  zur  Macht,  p.  358. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


278 

For  as  pain  is  entwined  in  an  essential  element  in 
the  perfect  achievement  of  that  which  seems  naturally 
the  most  pleasurable  of  the  arts,  so  it  is  with  the  whole 
art  of  living,  of  which  dancing  is  the  supreme  symbol. 
There  is  no  separating  Pain  and  Pleasure  without  mak¬ 
ing  the  first  meaningless  for  all  vital  ends  and  the 
second  turn  to  ashes.  To  exalt  pleasure  is  to  exalt 
pain;  and  we  cannot  understand  the  meaning  of  pain 
unless  we  understand  the  place  of  pleasure  in  the  art  of 
life.  In  England,  James  Hinton  sought  to  make  that 
clear,  equally  against  those  who  failed  to  see  that  pain 
is  as  necessary  morally  as  it  undoubtedly  is  biologically, 
and  against  those  who  would  puritanically  refuse  to 
accept  the  morality  of  pleasure.1  It  is  no  doubt  im¬ 
portant  to  resist  pain,  but  it  is  also  important  that  it 
should  be  there  to  resist.  Even  when  we  look  at  the 
matter  no  longer  subjectively  but  objectively,  we 
must  accept  pain  in  any  sound  aesthetic  or  meta¬ 
physical  picture  of  the  world.2 

We  must  not  be  surprised,  therefore,  that  this  way 
of  looking  at  life  as  an  art  has  spontaneously  com- 


1  Mrs.  Havelock  Ellis,  James  Hinton,  1918. 

*  This  has  been  well  seen  by  Jules  de  Gaultier:  “The  joys  and  the 
sorrows  which  fill  life  are,  the  one  and  the  other,”  he  says  ( La  Depen- 
dance  de  la  Morale  et  V Independance  des  Mceurs,  p.  340),  “elements  of 
spectacular  interest,  and  without  the  mixture  of  both  that  interest  would 
be  abolished.  To  make  of  the  representative  worth  of  phenomena  their 
justification  in  view  of  a  spectacular  end  alone,  avoids  the  objection  by 
which  the  moral  thesis  is  faced,  the  fact  of  pain.  Pain  becomes,  on  the 
contrary,  the  correlative  of  pleasure,  an  indispensable  means  for  its  real¬ 
ization.  Such  a  thesis  is  in  agreement  with  the  nature  of  things,  instead 
of  being  wounded  by  their  existence.” 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS  279 

mended  Itself  to  men  of  the  gravest  and  deepest  char¬ 
acter,  in  all  other  respects  widely  unlike.  Shaftesbury 
was  temperamentally  a  Stoic  whose  fragile  constitu¬ 
tion  involved  a  perpetual  endeavour  to  mould  life  to 
the  form  of  his  ideal.  And  if  we  go  back  to  Marcus 
Aurelius  we  find  an  austere  and  heroic  man  whose 
whole  life,  as  we  trace  it  in  his  “  Meditations,”  was  a 
splendid  struggle,  a  man  who  —  even,  it  seems,  un¬ 
consciously  —  had  adopted  the  aesthetic  criterion  of 
moral  goodness  and  the  artistic  conception  of  moral 
action.  Dancing  and  wrestling  express  to  his  eyes  the 
activity  of  the  man  who  is  striving  to  live,  and  the 
goodness  of  moral  actions  instinctively  appears  to  him 
as  the  beauty  of  natural  objects;  it  is  to  Marcus 
Aurelius  that  we  owe  that  immortal  utterance  of 
aesthetic  intuitionism:  “As  though  the  emerald  should 
say:  ‘Whatever  happens  I  must  be  emerald.’ ”  There 
could  be  no  man  more  unlike  the  Roman  Emperor,  or 
in  any  more  remote  field  of  action,  than  the  French 
saint  and  philanthropist  Vincent  de  Paul.  At  once  a 
genuine  Christian  mystic  and  a  very  wise  and  marvel¬ 
lously  effective  man  of  action,  Vincent  de  Paul  adopts 
precisely  the  same  simile  of  the  moral  attitude  that 
had  long  before  been  put  forth  by  Plotinus  and  in  the 
next  century  was  again  to  be  taken  up  by  Shaftesbury: 
“  My  daughters,”  he  wrote  to  the  Sisters  of  Charity, 
“  we  are  each  like  a  block  of  stone  which  is  to  be  trans¬ 
ferred  into  a  statue.  What  must  the  sculptor  do  to 
carry  out  his  design?  First  of  all  he  must  take  the 


28o 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


hammer  and  chip  off  all  that  he  does  not  need.  For 
this  purpose  he  strikes  the  stone  so  violently  that  if 
you  were  watching  him  you  would  say  he  intended  to 
break  it  to  pieces.  Then,  when  he  has  got  rid  of  the 
rougher  parts,  he  takes  a  smaller  hammer,  and  after¬ 
wards  a  chisel,  to  begin  the  face  with  all  the  features. 
When  that  has  taken  form,  he  uses  other  and  finer 
tools  to  bring  it  to  that  perfection  he  has  intended  for 
his  statue.”  If  we  desire  to  find  a  spiritual  artist  as 
unlike  as  possible  to  Vincent  de  Paul  we  may  take 
Nietzsche.  Alien  as  any  man  could  ever  be  to  a  cheap 
or  superficial  vision  of  the  moral  life,  and  far  too 
intellectually  keen  to  confuse  moral  problems  with 
purely  aesthetic  problems,  Nietzsche,  when  faced  by 
the  problem  of  living,  sets  himself  —  almost  as  in¬ 
stinctively  as  Marcus  Aurelius  or  Vincent  de  Paul  — 
at  the  standpoint  of  art.  “Alles  Leben  1st  Streit  um 
Geschmack  und  Schmecken.”  It  is  a  crucial  passage 
in  “Zarathustra” :  “All  life  is  a  dispute  about  taste 
and  tasting!  Taste:  that  is  weight  and  at  the  same 
time  scales  and  weigher;  and  woe  to  all  living  things 
that  would  live  without  dispute  about  weight  and 
scales  and  weigher!”  For  this  gospel  of  taste  is  no  easy 
gospel.  A  man  must  make  himself  a  work  of  art, 
Nietzsche  again  and  again  declares,  moulded  into 
beauty  by  suffering,  for  such  art  is  the  highest  moral¬ 
ity,  the  morality  of  the  Creator. 

There  is  a  certain  indefiniteness  about  the  concep¬ 
tion  of  morality  as  an  artistic  impulse,  to  be  judged  by 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS 


an  aesthetic  criterion,  which  is  profoundly  repugnant 
to  at  least  two  classes  of  minds  fully  entitled  to  make 
their  antipathy  felt.  In  the  first  place,  it  makes  no 
appeal  to  the  abstract  reasoner,  indifferent  to  the 
manifoldly  concrete  problems  of  living.  For  the  man 
whose  brain  is  hypertrophied  and  his  practical  life 
shrivelled  to  an  insignificant  routine  —  the  man  of 
whom  Kant  is  the  supreme  type  —  it  is  always  a 
temptation  to  rationalise  morality.  Such  a  pure  in- 
tellectualist,  overlooking  the  fact  that  human  beings 
are  not  mathematical  figures,  may  even  desire  to 
transform  ethics  into  a  species  of  geometry.  That  we 
may  see  in  Spinoza,  a  nobler  and  more  inspiring 
figure,  no  doubt,  but  of  the  same  temperament  as 
Kant.  The  impulses  and  desires  of  ordinary  men  and 
women  are  manifold,  inconstant,  often  conflicting,  and 
sometimes  overwhelming.  “Morality  is  a  fact  of 
sensibility,”  remarks  Jules  de  Gaultier;  “it  has  no 
need  to  have  recourse  to  reason  for  its  affirmations.” 
But  to  men  of  the  intellectualist  type  this  considera¬ 
tion  is  almost  negligible ;  all  the  passions  and  affections 
of  humanity  seem  to  them  meek  as  sheep  which  they 
may  shepherd,  and  pen  within  the  flimsiest  hurdles. 
William  Blake,  who  could  cut  down  to  that  central 
core  of  the  world  where  all  things  are  fused  together, 
knew  better  when  he  said  that  the  only  golden  rule  of 
life  is  “the  great  and  golden  rule  of  art.”  James 
Hinton  was  for  ever  expatiating  on  the  close  resem¬ 
blance  between  the  methods  of  art,  as  shown  espe- 


282 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


dally  in  painting,  and  the  methods  of  moral  action. 
Thoreau,  who  also  belonged  to  this  tribe,  declared,  in 
the  same  spirit  as  Blake,  that  there  is  no  golden  rule  in 
morals,  for  rules  are  only  current  silver;  “it  is  golden 
not  to  have  any  rule  at  all.” 

There  is  another  quite  different  type  of  person  who 
shares  this  antipathy  to  the  indefiniteness  of  aesthetic 
morality:  the  ambitious  moral  reformer.  The  man  of 
this  class  is  usually  by  no  means  devoid  of  strong 
passions;  but  for  the  most  part  he  possesses  no  great 
intellectual  calibre  and  so  is  unable  to  estimate  the 
force  and  complexity  of  human  impulses.  The  moral 
reformer,  eager  to  introduce  the  millennium  here  and 
now  by  the  aid  of  the  newest  mechanical  devices,  is 
righteously  indignant  with  anything  so  vague  as  an 
aesthetic  morality.  He  must  have  definite  rules  and 
regulations,  clear-cut  laws  and  by-laws,  with  an  arbi¬ 
trary  list  of  penalties  attached,  to  be  duly  inflicted  in 
this  world  or  the  next.  The  popular  conception  of 
Moses,  descending  from  the  sacred  mount  with  a 
brand-new  table  of  commandments,  which  he  declares 
have  been  delivered  to  him  by  God,  though  he  is 
ready  to  smash  them  to  pieces  on  the  slightest  provoca¬ 
tion,  furnishes  a  delightful  image  of  the  typical  moral 
reformer  of  every  age.  It  is,  however,  only  in  savage 
and  barbarous  stages  of  society,  or  among  the  un¬ 
cultivated  classes  of  civilisation,  that  the  men  of  this 
type  can  find  their  faithful  followers. 

Yet  there  is  more  to  be  said.  That  very  indefinite- 


THE  ART  OF  MORALS  283 

ness  of  the  criterion  of  moral  action,  falsely  supposed 
to  be  a  disadvantage,  is  really  the  prime  condition  for 
effective  moral  action.  The  academic  philosophers  of 
ethics,  had  they  possessed  virility  enough  to  enter  the 
field  of  real  life,  would  have  realised  —  as  we  cannot 
expect  the  moral  reformers  blinded  by  the  smoke  of 
their  own  fanaticism  to  realise  —  that  the  slavery  to 
rigid  formulas  which  they  preached  was  the  death  of 
all  high  moral  responsibility.  Life  must  always  be  a 
great  adventure,  with  risks  on  every  hand;  a  clear¬ 
sighted  eye,  a  many-sided  sympathy,  a  fine  daring,  an 
endless  patience,  are  for  ever  necessary  to  all  good 
living.  With  such  qualities  alone  may  the  artist  in  life 
reach  success;  without  them  even  the  most  devoted 
slave  to  formulas  can  only  meet  disaster.  No  reason¬ 
able  moral  being  may  draw  breath  in  the  world  without 
an  open-eyed  freedom  of  choice,  and  if  the  moral 
world  is  to  be  governed  by  laws,  better  to  people  it 
with  automatic  machines  than  with  living  men  and 
women. 

In  our  human  world  the  precision  of  mechanism  is 
for  ever  impossible.  The  indefiniteness  of  morality  is  a 
part  of  its  necessary  imperfection.  There  is  not  only 
room  in  morality  for  the  high  aspiration,  the  coura¬ 
geous  decision,  the  tonic  thrill  of  the  muscles  of  the 
soul,  but  we  have  to  admit  also  sacrifice  and  pain. 
The  lesser  good,  our  own  or  that  of  others,  is  merged  in 
a  larger  good,  and  that  cannot  be  without  some  rending 
of  the  heart.  So  all  moral  action,  however  in  the  end  it 


284  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE  "  * 

may  be  justified  by  its  harmony  and  balance,  is  in  the 
making  cruel  and  in  a  sense  even  immoral.  Therein 
lies  the  final  justification  of  the  aesthetic  conception  of 
morality.  It  opens  a  wider  perspective  and  reveals 
loftier  standpoints;  it  shows  how  the  seeming  loss  is 
part  of  an  ultimate  gain,  so  restoring  that  harmony 
and  beauty  which  the  unintelligent  partisans  of  a  hard 
and  barren  duty  so  often  destroy  for  ever.  41  Art/'  as 
Paulhan  declares,  “is  often  more  moral  than  morality 
itself."  Or,  as  Jules  de  Gaultier  holds,  “Art  is  in  a 
certain  sense  the  only  morality  which  life  admits." 
In  so  far  as  we  can  infuse  it  with  the  spirit  and  method 
of  art,  we  have  transformed  morality  into  something 
beyond  morality;  it  has  become  the  complete  embodi¬ 
ment  of  the  Dance  of  Life* 


CHAPTER  Vi! 

CONCLUSION 

I 

Life,  we  have  seen,  may  be  regarded  as  an  art.  But 
we  cannot  help  seeking  to  measure,  quantitatively  if 
not  qualitatively,  our  mode  of  life.  We  do  so,  for  the 
most  part,  instinctively  rather  than  scientifically.  It 
gratifies  us  to  imagine  that,  as  a  race,  we  have  reached 
a  point  on  the  road  of  progress  beyond  that  vouchsafed 
to  our  benighted  predecessors,  and  that,  as  individuals 
or  as  nations,  it  is  given  to  us,  fortunately,  —  or, 
rather,  through  our  superior  merits,  —  to  enjoy  a 
finer  degree  of  civilisation  than  the  individuals  and  the 
nations  around  us.  This  feeling  has  been  common  to 
most  or  all  branches  of  the  human  race.  In  the  classic 
world  of  antiquity  they  called  outsiders,  indiscrimi¬ 
nately,  “  barbarians  ” —  a  denomination  which  took 
on  an  increasingly  depreciative  sense;  and  even  the 
lowest  savages  sometimes  call  their  own  tribe  by  a 
word  which  means  “men,”  thereby  implying  that  all 
other  peoples  are  not  worthy  of  the  name. 

But  in  recent  centuries  there  has  been  an  attempt  to 
be  more  precise,  to  give  definite  values  to  the  feeling 
within  us.  All  sorts  of  dogmatic  standards  have  been 
set  up  by  which  to  measure  the  degree  of  a  people’s 
civilisation.  The  development  of  demography  and 


286 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


social  statistics  in  civilised  countries  during  the  past 
century  should,  it  has  seemed,  render  such  comparison 
easy.  Yet  the  more  carefully  we  look  into  the  nature  of 
these  standards  the  more  dubious  they  become.  On 
the  one  hand,  civilisation  is  so  complex  that  no  one 
test  furnishes  an  adequate  standard.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  methods  of  statistics  are  so  variable  and 
{uncertain,  so  apt  to  be  influenced  by  circumstance, 
that  it  is  never  possible  to  be  sure  that  one  is  operating 
with  figures  of  equal  weight. 

Recently  this  has  been  well  and  elaborately  shown 
by  Professor  Niceforo,  the  Italian  sociologist  and 
statistician.1  It  is  to  be  remembered  that  Niceforo  has 
himself  been  a  daring  pioneer  in  the  measurement  of 
life.  He  has  applied  the  statistical  method  not  only  to 
the  natural  and  social  sciences,  but  even  to  art,  espe¬ 
cially  literature.  When,  therefore,  he  discusses  the 
whole  question  of  the  validity  of  the  measurement  of 
civilisation,  his  conclusions  deserve  respect.  They  are 
the  more  worthy  of  consideration  since  his  originality 
in  the  statistical  field  is  balanced  by  his  learning,  and 
it  is  not  easy  to  recall  any  scientific  attempts  in  this 
field  which  he  has  failed  to  mention  somewhere  in  his 
book,  if  only  in  a  footnote. 

The  difficulties  begin  at  the  outset,  and  might  well 
serve  to  bar  even  the  entrance  to  discussion.  We  want 
to  measure  the  height  to  which  we  have  been  able  to 

1  Alfred  Niceforo,  Les  Indices  Num&riques  de  la  Civilisation  el  d* 
Progr'es.  Faria,  1921. 


CONCLUSION  287 

build  our  "civilisation”  towards  the  skies;  we  want 
to  measure  the  progress  we  have  made  in  our  great 
dance  of  life  towards  the  unknown  future  goal,  and  we 
have  no  idea  what  either  "civilisation”  or  "progress  ” 
means.1  This  difficulty  is  so  crucial,  for  it  involves  the 
very  essence  of  the  matter,  that  it  is  better  to  place  it 
aside  and  simply  go  ahead,  without  deciding,  for  the 
present,  precisely  what  the  ultimate  significance  of 
the  measurements  we  can  make  may  prove  to  be. 
Quite  sufficient  other  difficulties  await  us. 

There  is,  first  of  all,  the  bewildering  number  of  social 
phenomena  we  can  now  attempt  to  measure.  Two  cen¬ 
turies  ago  there  were  no  comparable  sets  of  figures 
whereby  to  measure  one  community  against  another 
community,  though  at  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  cen¬ 
tury  Boisguillebert  was  already  speaking  of  the  possi¬ 
bility  of  constructing  a  "barometer  of  prosperity.” 
Even  the  most  elementary  measurable  fact  of  all,  the 
numbering  of  peoples,  was  carried  out  so  casually  and 
imperfectly  and  indirectly,  if  at  all,  that  its  growth  and 
extent  could  hardly  be  compared  with  profit  in  any 
two  nations.  As  the  life  of  a  community  increases  in 
stability  and  orderliness  and  organisation,  registration 
incidentally  grows  elaborate,  and  thereby  the  possibil¬ 
ity  of  the  by-product  of  statistics.  This  aspect  of  social 

1  Professor  Bury,  in  his  admirable  history  of  the  idea  of  progress 
(J.  B.  Bury,  The  Idea  of  Progress ,  1920),  never  defines  the  meaning 
of  “progress.”  As  regards  the  meaning  of  “civilisation ”  see  essay  on 
“Civilisation,”  Havelock  Ellis,  The  Philosophy  of  Conflict  (1919),  pp. 

14-22. 


288 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


life  began  to  become  pronounced  during  the  nineteenth 
century,  and  it  was  in  the  middle  of  that  century  that 
Quetelet  appeared,  by  no  means  as  the  first  to  use  so¬ 
cial  statistics,  but  the  first  great  pioneer  in  the  manipu¬ 
lation  of  such  figures  in  a  scientific  manner,  with  a  large 
and  philosophical  outlook  on  their  real  significance.2 
Since  then  the  possible  number  of  such  means  of  nu¬ 
merical  comparison  has  much  increased.  The  diffi¬ 
culty  now  is  to  know  which  are  the  most  truly  indica¬ 
tive  of  real  superiority. 

But  before  we  consider  that,  again  even  at  the  out¬ 
set,  there  is  another  difficulty.  Our  apparently  com¬ 
parable  figures  are  often  not  really  comparable.  Each 
country  or  province  or  town  puts  forth  its  own  sets  of 
statistics  and  each  set  may  be  quite  comparable  within 
itself.  But  when  we  begin  critically  to  compare  one  set 
with  another  set,  all  sorts  of  fallacies  appear.  We  have 
to  allow,  not  only  for  varying  accuracy  and  complete¬ 
ness,  but  for  difference  of  method  in  collecting  and  reg¬ 
istering  the  facts,  and  for  all  sorts  of  qualifying  cir¬ 
cumstances  which  may  exist  at  one  place  or  time,  and 
not  at  other  places  or  times  with  which  we  are  seeking 
comparison. 

The  word  “civilisation”  is  of  recent  formation.  It 
came  from  France,  but  even  in  France  in  a  Dictionary 
of  1727  it  cannot  be  found,  though  the  verb  civiliser 
existed  as  far  back  as  1694,  meaning  to  polish  man¬ 
ners,  to  render  sociable,  to  become  urbane,  one  might 

1  Quetelet,  Physique  Sociale.  (1869.) 


CONCLUSION  289 

% 

say,  as  a  result  of  becoming  urban,  of  living  as  a  citizen 
in  cities.  We  have  to  recognise,  of  course,  that  the  idea 
of  civilisation  is  relative;  that  any  community  and  any 
age  has  its  own  civilisation,  and  its  own  ideals  of  civili¬ 
sation.  But,  that  assumed,  we  may  provisionally  assert 
—  and  we  shall  be  in  general  accordance  with  Nice- 
foro  —  that,  in  its  most  comprehensive  sense,  the  art  of 
civilisation  includes  the  three  groups  of  material  facts, 
intellectual  facts,  and  moral  (with  political)  facts,  so 
covering  all  the  essential  facts  in  our  life. 

Material  facts,  which  we  are  apt  to  consider  the  most 
easily  measurable,  include  quantity  and  distribution  of 
population,  production  of  wealth,  the  consumption  of 
food  and  luxuries,  the  standard  of  life.  Intellectual  facts 
include  both  the  diffusion  and  degree  of  instruction 
and  creative  activity  in  genius.  Moral  facts  include  the 
prevalence  of  honesty,  justice,  pity,  and  self-sacrifice, 
the  position  of  women  and  the  care  of  children.  They 
are  the  most  important  of  all  for  the  quality  of  a  civili¬ 
sation.  Voltaire  pointed  out  that  “  pity  and  justice  are 
the  foundations  of  society/’  and,  long  previously,  Peri¬ 
cles  in  Thucydides  described  the  degradation  of  the  Pelo¬ 
ponnesians  among  whom  every  one  thinks  only  of  his 
own  advantage,  and  every  one  believes  that  his  own 
negligence  of  other  things  will  pass  unperceived.  Plato 
in  his  “  Republic”  made  justice  the  foundation  of  har¬ 
mony  in  the  outer  life  and  the  inner  life,  while  in  mod¬ 
ern  times  various  philosophers,  like  Shadworth  Hodg¬ 
son,  have  emphasised  that  doctrine  of  Plato’s.  The 


290 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


whole  art  of  government  comes  under  this  head  and  the 
whole  treatment  of  human  personality. 

The  comparative  prevalence  of  criminality  has  long 
been  the  test  most  complacently  adopted  by  those  who 
seek  to  measure  civilisation  on  its  moral  and  most  fun¬ 
damental  aspect.  Crime  is  merely  a  name  for  the  most 
obvious,  extreme,  and  directly  dangerous  forms  of  what 
we  call  immorality  —  that  is  to  say,  departure  from 
the  norm  in  manners  and  customs.  Therefore  the  high¬ 
est  civilisation  is  that  with  the  least  crime.  But  is  it  so? 
The  more  carefully  we  look  into  the  matter,  the  more 
difficult  it  becomes  to  apply  this  test.  We  find  that 
even  at  the  outset.  Every  civilised  community  has  its 
own  way  of  dealing  with  criminal  statistics  and  the  dis¬ 
crepancies  thus  introduced  are  so  great  that  this  fact 
alone  makes  comparisons  almost  impossible.  It  is 
scarcely  necessary  to  point  out  that  varying  skill  and 
thoroughness  in  the  detection  of  crime,  and  varying  se¬ 
verity  in  the  attitude  towards  it,  necessarily  count  for 
much.  Of  not  less  significance  is  the  legislative  activity 
of  the  community ;  the  greater  the  number  of  laws,  the 
greater  the  number  of  offences  against  them.  If,  for  in¬ 
stance,  Prohibition  is  introduced  into  a  country,  the 
amount  of  delinquency  in  that  country  is  enormously 
increased,  but  it  would  be  rash  to  assert  that  the  coun¬ 
try  has  thereby  been  sensibly  lowered  in  the  scale  of 
civilisation.  To  avoid  this  difficulty,  it  has  been  pro¬ 
posed  to  take  into  consideration  only  what  are  called 
“natural  crimes”;  that  is,  those  everywhere  regarded 


CONCLUSION 


2QI 

as  punishable.  But,  even  then,  there  is  a  still  more  dis¬ 
concerting  consideration.  For,  after  all,  the  criminal¬ 
ity  of  a  country  is  a  by-product  of  its  energy  in  busi¬ 
ness  and  in  the  whole  conduct  of  affairs.  It  is  a  poison¬ 
ous  excretion,  but  excretion  is  the  measure  of  vital 
metabolism.  There  are,  moreover,  the  so-called  evolu¬ 
tive  social  crimes,  which  spring  from  motives  not  lower 
but  higher  than  those  ruling  the  society  in  which  they 
arise.1  Therefore,  we  cannot  be  sure  that  we  ought  not 
to  regard  the  most  criminal  country  as  that  which  in 
some  aspects  possesses  the  highest  civilisation. 

Let  us  turn  to  the  intellectual  aspect  of  civilisation. 
Here  we  have  at  least  two  highly  important  and  quite 
fairly  measurable  facts  to  consider:  the  production  of 
creative  genius  and  the  degree  and  diffusion  of  general 
instruction.  If  we  consider  the  matter  abstractly,  it  is 
highly  probable  that  we  shall  declare  that  no  civilisa¬ 
tion  can  be  worth  while  unless  it  is  rich  in  creative  gen¬ 
ius  and  unless  the  population  generally  exhibits  a  suf¬ 
ficiently  cultured  level  of  education  out  of  which  such 
genius  may  arise  freely  and  into  which  the  seeds  it  pro¬ 
duces  may  fruitfully  fall.  Yet,  what  do  we  find?  Alike, 
whether  we  go  back  to  the  earliest  civilisations  we  have 
definite  information  about  or  turn  to  the  latest  stages 
of  civilisation  we  know  to-day,  we  fail  to  see  any  corre¬ 
spondence  between  these  two  essential  conditions  of 
civilisation.  Among  peoples  in  a  low  state  of  culture, 

1  See  e.g.,  Maurice  Parmelee’s  Criminology,  the  sanest  and  moat  com- 
prehensive  manual  on  the  subject  we  have  in  English. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


292 

among  savages  generally,  such  instruction  and  educa¬ 
tion  as  exists  really  is  generally  diffused ;  every  member 
of  the  community  is  initiated  into  the  tribal  traditions; 
yet,  no  observers  of  such  peoples  seem  to  note  the 
emergence  of  individuals  of  strikingly  productive  gen¬ 
ius.  That,  so  far  as  we  know,  began  to  appear,  and,  in¬ 
deed,  in  marvellous  variety  and  excellence,  in  Greece, 
and  the  civilisation  of  Greece  (as  later  the  more  power¬ 
ful  but  coarser  civilisation  of  Rome)  was  built  up  on  a 
broad  basis  of  slavery,  which  nowadays  —  except,  of 
course,  when  disguised  as  industry  —  we  no  longer  re¬ 
gard  as  compatible  with  high  civilisation. 

Ancient  Greece,  indeed,  may  suggest  to  us  to  ask 
whether  the  genius  of  a  country  be  not  directly  op¬ 
posed  to  the  temper  of  the  population  of  that  country, 
and  its  “leaders”  really  be  its  outcasts.  (Some  believe 
that  many,  if  not  all,  countries  of  to-day  might  serve  to 
suggest  the  same  question.)  If  we  want  to  imagine  the 
real  spirit  of  Greece,  we  may  have  to  think  of  a  figure 
with  a  touch  of  Ulysses,  indeed,  but  with  more  of  Ther- 
sites.1  The  Greeks  who  interest  us  to-day  were  excep¬ 
tional  people,  usually  imprisoned,  exiled,  or  slain  by 
the  more  truly  representative  Greeks  of  their  time. 
When  Plato  and  the  others  set  forth  so  persistently  an 
ideal  of  wise  moderation  they  were  really  putting  up 
• —  and  in  vain  —  a  supplication  for  mercy  to  a  people 
who,  as  they  had  good  ground  for  realising,  knew  noth- 

1  £lie  Faure,  with  his  usual  incisive  insight,  has  set  out  the  real  char¬ 
acters  of  the  “Greek  Spirit”  (“ Reflexions  sur  le  G6nie  Grec, ”  Mondt 
Nouveau,  December,  1922). 


CONCLUSION 


293 

ing  of  wisdom,  and  scoffed  at  moderation,  and  were 
mainly  inspired  by  ferocity  and  intrigue. 

To  turn  to  a  more  recent  example,  consider  the 
splendid  efflorescence  of  genius  in  Russia  during  the 
central  years  of  the  last  century,  still  a  vivifying  influ¬ 
ence  on  the  literature  and  music  of  the  world;  yet  the 
population  of  Russia  had  only  just  been  delivered,  nom¬ 
inally  at  least,  from  serfdom,  and  still  remained  at  the 
intellectual  and  economic  level  of  serfs.  To-day,  educa¬ 
tion  has  become  diffused  in  the  Western  world.  Yet  no 
one  would  dream  of  asserting  that  genius  is  more  prev¬ 
alent.  Consider  the  United  States,  for  instance,  dur¬ 
ing  the  past  half-century.  It  would  surely  be  hard  to 
find  any  country,  except  Germany,  where  education  is 
more  highly  esteemed  or  better  understood,  and  where 
instruction  is  more  widely  diffused.  Yet,  so  far  as  the 
production  of  high  original  genius  is  concerned,  an  old 
Italian  city,  like  Florence,  with  a  few  thousand  inhabit¬ 
ants,  had  far  more  to  show  than  all  the  United  States 
put  together.  So  that  we  are  at  a  loss  how  to  apply  the 
intellectual  test  to  the  measurement  of  civilisation.  It 
would  almost  seem  that  the  two  essential  elements  of 
this  test  are  mutually  incompatible. 

Let  us  fall  back  on  the  simple  solid  fundamental  test 
furnished  by  the  material  aspect  of  civilisation.  Here 
we  are  among  elementary  facts  and  the  first  that  began 
to  be  measured.  Yet  our  difficulties,  instead  of  dimin¬ 
ishing,  rather  increase.  It  is  here,  too,  that  we  chiefly 
meet  with  what  Niceforo  has  called  “the  paradoxical 


294 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


symptoms  of  superiority  in  progress,"  though  I  should 
prefer  to  call  them  ambivalent;  that  is  to  say,  that, 
while  from  one  point  of  view  they  indicate  superiority, 
from  another,  even  though  some  may  call  it  a  lower 
point  of  view,  they  appear  to  indicate  inferiority.  This 
is  well  illustrated  by  the  test  of  growth  of  population, 
or  the  height  of  the  birth-rate,  better  by  the  birth-rate 
considered  in  relation  to  the  death-rate,  for  they  can¬ 
not  be  intelligibly  considered  apart.  The  law  of  Nature 
is  reproduction,  and  if  an  intellectual  rabbit  were  able 
to  study  human  civilisation  he  would  undoubtedly 
regard  rapidity  of  multiplication,  in  which  he  has 
himself  attained  so  high  a  degree  of  proficiency,  as 
evidence  of  progress  in  civilisation.  In  fact,  as  we 
know,  there  are  even  human  beings  who  take  the 
same  view,  whence  we  have  what  has  been  termed 
“  Rabbitism”  in  men.  Yet,  if  anything  is  clear  in  this 
obscure  field,  it  is  that  the  whole  tendency  of  evolu¬ 
tion  is  towards  a  diminishing  birth-rate.1  The  most 
civilised  countries  everywhere,  and  the  most  civilised 
people  in  them,  are  those  with  the  lowest  birth-rate. 
Therefore,  we  have  here  to  measure  the  height  of  civili¬ 
sation  by  a  test  which,  if  carried  to  an  extreme,  would 
mean  the  disappearance  of  civilisation.  Another  such 
ambivalent  test  is  the  consumption  of  luxuries  of  which 

1  This  tendency,  on  which  Herbert  Spencer  long  ago  insisted,  is  in  its 
larger  aspects  quite  clear.  E.  C.  Pell  ( The  Law  of  Births  and  Deaths , 
1921)  has  argued  that  it  holds  good  of  civilised  man  to-day,  and  that  our 
decreasing  birth-rate  with  civilisation  is  quite  independent  of  any  effort 
on  Man’s  part  to  attain  that  evolutionary  end. 


CONCLUSION 


295 

alcohol  and  tobacco  are  the  types.  There  is  held  to  be 
no  surer  test  of  civilisation  than  the  increase  per  head 
of  the  consumption  of  alcohol  and  tobacco.  Yet  alco¬ 
hol  and  tobacco  are  recognisably  poisons,  so  that  their 
consumption  has  only  to  be  carried  far  enough  to  de¬ 
stroy  civilisation  altogether.  Again,  take  the  preva¬ 
lence  of  suicide.  That,  without  doubt,  is  a  test  of  height 
in  civilisation ;  it  means  that  the  population  is  winding 
up  its  nervous  and  intellectual  system  to  the  utmost 
point  of  tension  and  that  sometimes  it  snaps.  We 
should  be  justified  in  regarding  as  very  questionable 
a  high  civilisation  which  failed  to  show  a  high  sui¬ 
cide-rate.  Yet  suicide  is  the  sign  of  failure,  misery, 
and  despair.  How  can  we  regard  the  prevalence 
of  failure,  misery,  and  despair  as  the  mark  of  high 
civilisation? 

Thus,  whichever  of  the  three  groups  of  facts  we  at¬ 
tempt  to  measure,  it  appears  on  examination  almost 
hopelessly  complex.  We  have  to  try  to  make  our  meth¬ 
ods  correspondingly  complex.  Niceforo  had  invoked 
co- variation,  or  simultaneous  and  sympathetic  changes 
in  various  factors  of  civilisation ;  he  explains  the  index 
number,  and  he  appeals  to  mathematics  for  aid  out  of 
the  difficulties.  He  also  attempts  to  combine,  with  the 
help  of  diagrams,  a  single  picture  out  of  these  awkward 
and  contradictory  tests.  The  example  he  gives  is  that 
of  France  during  the  fifty  years  preceding  the  war.  It  is 
an  interesting  example  because  there  is  reason  to  con¬ 
sider  France  as,  in  some  respects,  the  most  highly  civil- 


296  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

ised  of  countries.  What  are  the  chief  significant  meas¬ 
urable  marks  of  this  superiority?  Niceforo  selects 
about  a  dozen,  and,  avoiding  the  difficult  attempt  to 
compare  France  with  other  countries,  he  confines  him¬ 
self  to  the  more  easily  practicable  task  of  ascertaining 
whether,  or  in  what  respects,  the  general  art  of  civilisa¬ 
tion  in  France,  the  movement  of  the  collective  life,  has 
been  upward  or  downward.  When  the  different  cate¬ 
gories  are  translated,  according  to  recognised  methods, 
into  index  numbers,  taking  the  original  figures  from 
the  official  “Resum6”  of  French  statistics,  it  is  found 
that  each  line  of  movement  follows  throughout  the 
same  direction,  though  often  in  zigzag  fashion,  and 
never  turns  back  on  itself.  In  this  way  it  appears  that 
the  consumption  of  coal  has  been  more  than  doubled, 
the  consumption  of  luxuries  (sugar,  coffee,  alcohol) 
nearly  doubled,  the  consumption  of  food  per  head  (as 
tested  by  cheese  and  potatoes)  also  increasing.  Sui¬ 
cide  has  increased  fifty  per  cent;  wealth  has  increased 
slightly  and  irregularly;  the  upward  movement  of  pop¬ 
ulation  has  been  extremely  slight  and  partly  due  to 
immigration;  the  death-rate  has  fallen,  though  not  so 
much  as  the  birth-rate;  the  number  of  persons  con¬ 
victed  of  offence  by  the  courts  has  fallen ;  the  propor¬ 
tion  of  illiterate  persons  has  diminished ;  divorces  have 
greatly  increased,  and  also  the  number  of  syndicalist 
workers,  but  these  two  movements  are  of  comparative 
recent  growth. 

This  example  well  shows  what  it  is  possible  to  do  by 


CONCLUSION  297 

the  most  easily  available  and  generally  accepted  tests 
by  which  to  measure  the  progress  of  a  community  in 
the  art  of  civilisation.  Every  one  of  the  tests  applied 
to  France  reveals  an  upward  tendency  of  civilisation* 
though  some  of  them,  such  as  the  fall  in  the  death-rate, 
are  not  strongly  pronounced  and  much  smaller  than 
may  be  found  in  many  other  countries.  Yet,  at  the 
same  time,  while  we  have  to  admit  that  each  of  these 
lines  of  movement  indicates  an  upward  tendency  of  civ¬ 
ilisation,  it  by  no  means  follows  that  we  can  view  them 
all  with  complete  satisfaction.  It  may  even  be  said 
that  some  of  them  have  only  to  be  carried  further  in  or¬ 
der  to  indicate  dissolution  and  decay.  The  consump¬ 
tion  of  luxuries,  for  instance,  as  already  noted,  is  the 
consumption  of  poisons.  The  increase  of  wealth  means 
little  unless  we  take  into  account  its  distribution.  The 
increase  of  syndicalism,  while  it  is  a  sign  of  increased 
independence,  intelligence,  and  social  aspiration  among 
the  workers,  is  also  a  sign  that  the  social  system  is  be¬ 
coming  regarded  as  unsound.  So  that,  while  all  these 
tests  may  be  said  to  indicate  a  rising  civilisation,  they 
yet  do  not  invalidate  the  wise  conclusion  of  Niceforo 
that  a  civilisation  is  never  an  exclusive  mass  of  bene¬ 
fits,  but  a  mass  of  values,  positive  and  negative,  and  it 
may  even  be  said  that  most  often  the  conquest  of  a 
benefit  in  one  domain  of  a  civilisation  brings  into  an¬ 
other  domain  of  that  civilisation  inevitable  evils.  Long 
ago,  Montesquieu  had  spoken  of  the  evils  of  civilisation 
and  left  the  question  of  the  value  of  civilisation  open, 


29 8  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

while  Rousseau,  more  passionately,  had  decided 
against  civilisation. 

We  see  the  whole  question  from  another  point,  yet 
not  incongruously,  when  we  turn  to  Professor  William 
McDougall’s  Lowell  Lectures,  “Is  America  Safe  for 
Democracy?”  since  republished  under  the  more  gen¬ 
eral  title  “National  Welfare  and  National  Decay,”  for 
the  author  recognises  that  the  questions  he  deals  with 
go  to  the  root  of  all  high  civilisation.  As  he  truly  ob¬ 
serves,  civilisation  grows  constantly  more  complex  and 
also  less  subject  to  the  automatically  balancing  in¬ 
fluence  of  national  selection,  more  dependent  for  its 
stability  on  our  constantly  regulative  and  foreseeing 
control.  Yet,  while  the  intellectual  task  placed  upon 
us  is  ever  growing  heavier,  our  brains  are  not  growing 
correspondingly  heavier  to  bear  it.  There  is,  as  Remy 
de  Gourmont  often  pointed  out,  no  good  reason  to  sup¬ 
pose  that  we  are  in  any  way  innately  superior  to  our 
savage  ancestors,  who  had  at  least  as  good  physical 
constitutions  and  at  least  as  large  brains.  The  result  is 
that  the  small  minority  among  us  which  alone  can  at¬ 
tempt  to  cope  with  our  complexly  developing  civilisa¬ 
tion  comes  to  the  top  by  means  of  what  Ars&ne  Du¬ 
mont  called  social  capillarity,  and  McDougall  the  so¬ 
cial  ladder.  The  small  upper  stratum  is  of  high  quality, 
the  large  lower  stratum  of  poor  quality,  and  with 
a  tendency  to  feeble-mindedness.  It  is  to  this  large 
lower  stratum  that,  with  our  democratic  tendencies, 
we  assign  the  political  and  other  guidance  of  the 


CONCLUSION 


299 

community,  and  it  is  this  lower  stratum  which  has  the 
higher  birth-rate,  since  with  all  high  civilisation  the  nor¬ 
mal  birth-rate  is  low.1  McDougall  is  not  concerned  with 
the  precise  measurement  of  civilisation,  and  may  not 
be  familiar  with  the  attempts  that  have  been  made  in 
that  direction.  It  is  his  object  to  point  out  the  neces¬ 
sity  in  high  civilisation  for  a  deliberate  and  purposive 
art  of  eugenics,  if  we  would  prevent  the  eventual  ship¬ 
wreck  of  civilisation.  But  we  see  how  his  conclusions 
emphasise  those  difficulties  in  the  measurement  of  civ¬ 
ilisation  which  Niceforo  has  so  clearly  set  forth. 

McDougall  is  repeating  what  many,  especially 
among  eugenists,  have  previously  said.  While  not  dis¬ 
puting  the  element  of  truth  in  the  facts  and  arguments 
brought  forward  from  this  side,  it  may  be  pointed 
out  that  they  are  often  overstated.  This  has  been  well 
argued  by  Carr-Saunders  in  his  valuable  and  almost 
monumental  work,  “The  Population  Problem,’ ’  and  his 
opinion  is  the  more  worthy  of  attention  as  he  is  himself 
a  worker  in  the  cause  of  eugenics.  He  points  out  that 
the  social  ladder  is,  after  all,  hard  to  climb,  and  that  it 
only  removes  a  few  individuals  from  the  lower  social 
stratum,  while  among  those  who  thus  climb,  even 
though  they  do  not  sink  back,  regression  to  the  mean  is 
ever  in  operation  so  that  they  do  not  greatly  enrich  in 

1  Professor  McDougall  refers  to  the  high  birth-rate  of  the  lower  stra¬ 
tum  as  more  “normal.”  If  that  were  so,  civilisation  would  certainly  be 
doomed.  All  high  evolution  normally  involves  a  low  birth-rate.  Strange 
how  difficult  it  is  even  for  those  most  concerned  with  these  questions  to 
see  the  facts  simply  and  clearly  I 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


300 

the  end  the  class  they  have  climbed  up  to.  Moreover, 
as  Carr-Saunders  pertinently  asks,  are  we  so  sure  that 
the  qualities  that  mark  successful  climbers  —  self-as¬ 
sertion,  acquisition,  emulation  —  are  highly  desirable? 
“It  may  even  be,”  he  adds,  “that  we  might  view  a 
diminution  in  the  average  strength  of  some  of  the  qual¬ 
ities  which  mark  the  successful  at  least  with  equanim¬ 
ity.”  Taken  altogether,  it  would  seem  that  the  differ¬ 
ences  between  social  classes  may  mainly  be  explained 
by  environmental  influences.  There  is,  however, 
ground  to  recognise  a  slight  intellectual  superiority  in 
the  upper  social  class,  apart  from  environment,  and  so 
great  is  the  significance  for  civilisation  of  quality  that 
even  when  the  difference  seems  slight  it  must  not  be 
regarded  as  negligible.1 

More  than  half  a  century  ago,  indeed,  George  Sand 
pointed  out  that  we  must  distinguish  between  the  civil¬ 
isation  of  quantity  and  the  civilisation  of  quality.  As 
the  great  Morgagni  had  said  much  earlier,  it  is  not 
enough  to  count,  we  must  evaluate;  “observations  are 
not  to  be  numbered,  they  are  to  be  weighed.”  It  is  not 
the  biggest  things  that  are  the  most  civilised  things. 
The  largest  structures  of  Hindu  or  Egyptian  art  are 
outweighed  by  the  temples  on  the  Acropolis  of  Athens, 
and  similarly,  as  Bryce,  who  had  studied  the  matter  so 
thoroughly,  was  wont  to  insist,  it  is  the  smallest  democ¬ 
racies  which  to-day  stand  highest  in  the  scale.  We  have 

1  A.  M.  Carr-Saunders,  The  Population  Problem:  A  Study  in  Human 
Evolution  (1922),  pp.  457,  472. 


CONCLUSION  301 

seen  that  there  is  much  in  civilisation  which  we  may 
profitably  measure,  yet,  when  we  seek  to  scale  the  last 
heights  of  civilisation,  the  ladder  of  our  “  metrology ” 
comes  to  grief.  “The  methods  of  the  mind  are  too 
weak,”  as  Comte  said,  “and  the  Universe  is  too  com¬ 
plex.”  Life,  even  the  life  of  the  civilised  community,  is 
an  art,  and  the  too  much  is  as  fatal  as  the  too  little. 
We  may  say  of  civilisation,  as  Renan  said  of  truth,  that 
it  lies  in  a  nuance.  Gumplowicz  believed  that  civili¬ 
sation  is  the  beginning  of  disease;  Arsene  Dumont 
thought  that  it  inevitably  held  within  itself  a  toxic 

1 

principle,  a  principle  by  which  it  is  itself  in  time 
poisoned.  The  more  rapidly  a  civilisation  progresses, 
the  sooner  it  dies  for  another  to  arise  in  its  place.  That 
may  not  seem  to  every  one  a  cheerful  prospect.  Yet, 
if  our  civilisation  has  failed  to  enable  us  to  look  further 
than  our  own  egoistic  ends,  what  has  our  civilisation 
been  worth? 

v 

II 

The  attempt  to  apply  measurement  to  civilisation  is, 
therefore,  a  failure.  That  is,  indeed,  only  another  way 
of  saying  that  civilisation,  the  whole  manifold  web  of 
life,  is  an  art.  We  may  dissect  out  a  vast  number  of 
separate  threads  and  measure  them.  It  is  quite  worth 
while  to  do  so.  But  the  results  of  such  anatomical  in¬ 
vestigation  admit  of  the  most  diverse  interpretation, 
and,  at  the  best,  can  furnish  no  adequate  criterion  of 
the  worth  of  a  complex  living  civilisation. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


302 

Yet,  although  there  is  no  precise  measurement  of  the 
total  value  of  any  large  form  of  life,  we  can  still  make 
an  estimate  of  its  value.  We  can  approach  it,  that  is  to 
say,  as  a  work  of  art.  We  can  even  reach  a  certain 
approximation  to  agreement  in  the  formation  of  such 
estimates. 

When  Protagoras  said  that  “Man  is  the  measure 
of  all  things,”  he  uttered  a  dictum  which  has  been 
variously  interpreted,  but  from  the  standpoint  we  have 
now  reached,  from  which  Man  is  seen  to  be  preemi¬ 
nently  an  artist,  it  is  a  monition  to  us  that  we  cannot  to 
the  measurement  of  life  apply  our  instruments  of  preci¬ 
sion,  and  cut  life  down  to  their  graduated  marks.  They 
have,  indeed,  their  immensely  valuable  uses,  but  it  is 
strictly  as  instruments  and  not  as  ends  of  living  or  cri¬ 
teria  of  the  worth  of  life.  It  is  in  the  failure  to  grasp 
this  that  the  human  tragedy  has  often  consisted,  and  for 
over  two  thousand  years  the  dictum  of  Protagoras  has 
been  held  up  for  the  pacification  of  that  tragedy,  for 
the  most  part,  in  vain.  Protagoras  was  one  of  those 
“Sophists”  who  have  been  presented  to  our  contempt 
in  absurd  traditional  shapes  ever  since  Plato  carica¬ 
tured  them  —  though  it  may  well  be  that  some,  as,  it 
has  been  suggested,  Gorgias,  may  have  given  colour  to 
the  caricature  —  and  it  is  only  to-day  that  it  is  possi¬ 
ble  to  declare  that  we  must  place  the  names  of  Pro¬ 
tagoras,  of  Prodicus,  of  Hippias,  even  of  Gorgias,  beside 
those  of  Herodotus,  Pindar,  and  Pericles.  1 

1  Dupr6el,  La  Li^ende  Socratiquc  (1922),  p.  428.  Dupr6el  considers 


CONCLUSION 


303 


It  is  in  the  sphere  of  morals  that  the  conflict  has  often 
been  most  poignant.  I  have  already  tried  to  indicate 
how  revolutionary  is  the  change  which  the  thoughts  of 
many  have  had  to  undergo.  This  struggle  of  a  living 
and  flexible  and  growing  morality  against  a  morality 
that  is  rigid  and  inflexible  and  dead  has  at  some  periods 
of  human  history  been  almost  dramatically  presented. 
It  was  so  in  the  seventeenth  century  around  the  new 
moral  discoveries  of  the  Jesuits;  and  the  Jesuits  were 
rewarded  by  becoming  almost  until  to-day  a  by-word 
for  all  that  is  morally  poisonous  and  crooked  and  false 
—  for  all  that  is  “Jesuitical.”  There  was  once  a  great 
quarrel  between  the  Jesuits  and  the  Jansenists  —  a 
quarrel  which  is  scarcely  dead  yet,  for  all  Christendom 
took  sides  in  it  —  and  the  Jansenists  had  the  supreme 
good  fortune  to  entrap  on  their  side  a  great  man  of  gen¬ 
ius  whose  onslaught  on  the  Jesuits,  “Les  Provinciates,  ” 

(p.  431)  that  the  Protagorean  spirit  was  marked  by  the  idea  of  explaining 
the  things  of  thought,  and  life  in  general,  by  the  meeting,  opposition,  and 
harmony  of  individual  activities,  leading  up  to  the  sociological  notion  of 
convention ,  and  behind  it,  of  relativity.  Nietzsche  was  a  pioneer  in  re¬ 
storing  the  Sophists  to  their  rightful  place  in  Greek  thought.  The  Greek 
culture  of  the  Sophists  grew  out  of  all  the  Greek  instincts,  he  says  ( The 
Will  to  Power ,  section  428):  “And  it  has  ultimately  shown  itself  to  b« 
right.  Our  modern  attitude  of  mind  is,  to  a  great  extent,  Heraclitean, 
Democritean,  and  Protagorean.  To  say  that  it  is  Protagorean  is  even 
sufficient,  because  Protagoras  was  himself  a  synthesis  of  Heraclitus  and 
Democritus.”  The  Sophists,  by  realizing  that  many  supposed  objective 
ideas  were  really  subjective,  have  often  been  viewed  with  suspicion  as 
content  with  a  mere  egotistically  individualistic  conception  of  life.  The 
same  has  happened  to  Nietzsche.  It  was  probably  an  error  as  regards  the 
greatest  Sophists,  and  is  certainly  an  error,  though  even  still  commonly 
committed,  as  regards  Nietzsche;  see  the  convincing  discussion  of  Nietz* 
ache’s  moral  aim  in  Salter,  Nietzsche  the  Thinker ,  chap,  xxiv. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


304 

is  even  still  supposed  by  many  people  to  have  settled 
the  question.  They  are  allowed  so  to  suppose  because 
no  one  now  reads  “Les  Provinciales.”  But  Remy  de 
Gourmont,  who  was  not  only  a  student  of  unread 
books  but  a  powerfully  live  thinker,  read  “Les  Provin¬ 
ciales,”  and  found,  as  he  set  forth  in  “Le  Chemin  de 
Velours,”  that  it  was  the  Jesuits  who  were  more  nearly 
in  the  right,  more  truly  on  the  road  of  advance,  than 
Pascal.  As  Gourmont  showed  by  citation,  there  were 
Jesuit  doctrines  put  forth  by  Pascal  with  rhetorical 
irony  as  though  the  mere  statement  sufficed  to  con¬ 
demn  them,  which  need  only  to  be  liberated  from  their 
irony,  and  we  might  nowadays  add  to  them.  Thus 
spake  Zarathustra.  Pascal  was  a  geometrician  who 
(though  he,  indeed,  once  wrote  in  his  ”Pens6es”: 
“There  is  no  general  rule”)  desired  to  deal  with  the 
variable,  obscure,  and  unstable  complexities  of  human 
action  as  though  they  were  problems  in  mathematics. 
But  the  Jesuits,  while  it  is  true  that  they  still  accepted 
the  existence  of  absolute  rules,  realised  that  rules 
must  be  made  adjustable  to  the  varying  needs  of  life. 
They  thus  became  the  pioneers  of  many  conceptions 
which  are  accepted  in  modern  practice.1  Their  doc¬ 
trine  of  invincible  ignorance  was  a  discovery  of  that 
kind,  forecasting  some  of  the  opinions  now  held  regard¬ 
ing  responsibility.  But  in  that  age,  as  Gourmont 

1  I  may  here,  perhaps,  remark  that  in  the  General  Preface  to  my 
Studies  in  the  Psychology  of  Sex  I  suggested  that  we  now  have  to  lay  the 
foundation  of  a  new  casuistry,  no  longer  theological  and  Christian,  but 
naturalistic  and  scientific. 


CONCLUSION 


305 


pointed  out,  “to  proclaim  that  there  might  be  a  sin  or 
an  offence  without  guilty  parties  was  an  act  of  intellec¬ 
tual  audacity,  as  well  as  scientific  probity.”  Nowadays 
the  Jesuits  (together,  it  is  interesting  to  note,  with 
their  baroque  architecture)  are  coming  into  credit,  and 
casuistry  again  seems  reputable.  To  establish  that 
there  can  be  no  single  inflexible  moral  code  for  all  in¬ 
dividuals  has  been,  and  indeed  remains,  a  difficult  and 
delicate  task,  yet  the  more  profoundly  one  considers 
it,  the  more  clearly  it  becomes  visible  that  what  once 
seemed  a  dead  and  rigid  code  of  morality  must  more 
and  more  become  a  living  act  of  casuistry.  The  Jes¬ 
uits,  because  they  had  a  glimmer  of  this  truth,  repre¬ 
sented,  as  Gourmont  concluded,  the  honest  and  most 
acceptable  part  of  Christianity,  responding  to  the  ne¬ 
cessities  of  life,  and  were  rendering  a  service  to  civilisa¬ 
tion  which  we  should  never  forget. 

There  are  some  who  may  not  very  cordially  go  to  the 
Jesuits  as  an  example  of  the  effort  to  liberate  men  from 
the  burden  of  a  subservience  to  rigid  little  rules,  towards 
the  unification  of  life  as  an  active  process,  however  in¬ 
fluential  they  may  be  admitted  to  be  among  the  pio¬ 
neers  of  that  movement.  Y et  we  may  turn  in  what 
direction  we  will,  we  shall  perpetually  find  the  same 
movement  under  other  disguises.  There  is,  for  in¬ 
stance,  Mr.  Bertrand  Russell,  who  is,  for  many,  the 
most  interesting  and  stimulating  thinker  to  be  found  in 
England  to-day.  He  might  scarcely  desire  to  be  associ¬ 
ated  with  the  Jesuits.  Yet  he  also  seeks  to  unify  life  and 


306 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


even  in  an  essentially  religious  spirit.  His  way  of  put¬ 
ting  this,  in  his  “  Principles  of  Social  Reconstruction/’ 
is  to  state  that  man’s  impulses  may  be  divided  into 
those  that  are  creative  and  those  that  are  possessive, 
that  is  to  say,  concerned  with  acquisition.  The  im¬ 
pulses  of  the  second  class  are  a  source  of  inner  and 
outer  disharmony  and  they  involve  conflict;  “it  is  pre¬ 
occupation  with  possessions  more  than  anything  else 
that  prevents  men  from  living  freely  and  nobly”;  it  is 
the  creative  impulse  in  which  real  life  consists,  and 
“the  typical  creative  impulse  is  that  of  the  artist.” 
Now  this  conception  (which  was  that  Plato  assigned  to 
the  “guardians”  in  his  communistic  State)  may  be  a 
little  too  narrowly  religious  for  those  whose  position  in 
life  renders  a  certain  “preoccupation  with  possessions” 
inevitable;  it  is  useless  to  expect  us  all  to  become,  at 
present,  fakirs  and  Franciscans,  “counting  nothing 
one’s  own,  save  only  one’s  harp.”  But  in  regarding  the 
creative  impulses  as  the  essential  part  of  life,  and  as 
typically  manifested  in  the  form  of  art,  Bertrand  Rus¬ 
sell  is  clearly  in  the  great  line  of  movement  with  which 
we  have  been  throughout  concerned.  We  must  only  at 
the  same  time  —  as  we  shall  see  later  —  remember 
that  the  distinction  between  the  “creative”  and  the 
“possessive”  impulses,  although  convenient,  is  super¬ 
ficial.  In  creation  we  have  not  really  put  aside  the  pos¬ 
sessive  instinct,  we  may  even  have  intensified  it.  For 
it  has  been  reasonably  argued  that  it  is  precisely  the 
deep  urgency  of  the  impulse  to  possess  which  stirs  the 


CONCLUSION 


307 

creative  artist.  He  creates  because  that  is  the  best 
way,  or  the  only  way,  of  gratifying  his  passionate  de¬ 
sire  to  possess.  Two  men  desire  to  possess  a  woman, 
and  one  seizes  her,  the  other  writes  a  “Vita  Nuova” 
about  her;  they  have  both  gratified  the  instinct  of  pos¬ 
session,  and  the  second,  it  may  be,  most  satisfyingly 
and  most  lastingly.  So  that  —  apart  from  the  impos¬ 
sibility,  and  even  the  undesirability,  of  dispensing  with 
the  possessive  instinct  —  it  may  be  well  to  recognise 
that  the  real  question  is  one  of  values  in  possession. 
We  must  needs  lay  up  treasure;  but  the  fine  artist  in 
living,  so  far  as  may  be,  lays  up  his  treasure  in  Heaven. 

In  recent  time  some  alert  thinkers  have  been  moved 
to  attempt  to  measure  the  art  of  civilisation  by  less  im¬ 
possibly  exact  methods  than  of  old,  by  the  standard 
of  art,  and  even  of  fine  art.  In  a  remarkable  book  on 
“The  Revelations  of  Civilisation’'  —  published  about 
three  years  before  the  outbreak  of  that  Great  War 
which  some  have  supposed  to  date  a  revolutionary 
point  in  civilisation  —  Dr.  W.  M.  Flinders  Petrie,  who 
has  expert  knowledge  of  the  Egyptian  civilisation 
which  was  second  to  none  in  its  importance  for  man¬ 
kind,  has  set  forth  a  statement  of  the  cycles  to  which 
all  civilisations  are  subject.  Civilisation,  he  points  out, 
is  essentially  an  intermittent  phenomenon.  We  have  to 
compare  the  various  periods  of  civilisation  and  observe 
what  they  have  in  common  in  order  to  find  the  general 
type.  “  It  should  be  examined  like  any  other  action  of 
Nature;  its  recurrences  should  be  studied,  and  all  the 


3°8 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


principles  which  underlie  its  variations  should  be  de¬ 
fined.”  Sculpture,  he  believes,  may  be  taken  as  a  cri¬ 
terion,  not  because  it  is  the  most  important,  but  because 
it  is  the  most  convenient  and  easily  available,  test.  We 
may  say  with  the  old  Etruscans  that  every  race  has  its 
Great  Year  —  it  sprouts,  flourishes,  decays,  and  dies. 
The  simile,  Petrie  adds,  is  the  more  precise  because 
there  are  always  irregular  fluctuations  of  the  seasonal 
weather.  There  have  been  eight  periods  of  civilisation, 
he  reckons,  in  calculable  human  history.  We  are  now 
near  the  end  of  the  eighth,  which  reached  its  climax 
about  the  year  1800 ;  since  then  there  have  been  merely 
archaistic  revivals,  the  value  of  which  may  be  variously 
interpreted.  He  scarcely  thinks  we  can  expect  another 
period  of  civilisation  to  arise  for  several  centuries  at 
least.  The  average  length  of  a  period  of  civilisation  is 
1330  years.  Ours  Petrie  dates  from  about  a.d.  450.  It 
has  always  needed  a  fresh  race  to  produce  a  new  period 
of  civilisation.  In  Europe,  between  a.d.  300  and  600, 
some  fifteen  new  races  broke  in  from  north  and  east 
for  slow  mixture.  “If,”  he  concluded,  “the  source  of 
every  civilisation  has  lain  in  race  mixture,  it  may  be 
that  eugenics  will,  in  some  future  civilisation,  carefully 
segregate  fine  races,  and  prohibit  continual  mixture, 
until  they  have  a  distinct  type,  which  will  start  a  new 
civilisation  when  transplanted.  The  future  progress  of 
Man  may  depend  as  much  on  isolation  to  establish  a 
type  as  on  fusion  of  types  when  established.” 

At  the  time  when  Flinders  Petrie  was  publishing  his 


CONCLUSION 


309 


suggestive  book,  Dr.  Oswald  Spengler,  apparently  in 
complete  ignorance  of  it,  was  engaged  in  a  far  more  ela¬ 
borate  work,  not  actually  published  till  after  the  War, 
in  which  an  analogous  conception  of  the  growth  and 
decay  of  civilisations  was  put  forward  in  a  more  philo¬ 
sophic  way,  perhaps  more  debatable  on  account  of  the 
complex  detail  in  which  the  conception  was  worked 
out.1  Petrie  had  considered  the  matter  in  a  summary 
empiric  manner  with  close  reference  to  the  actual 
forces  viewed  broadly.  Spengler’s  manner  is  narrower, 
more  subjective,  and  more  metaphysical.  He  distin¬ 
guishes —  though  he  also  recognises  eight  periods — be¬ 
tween  “ culture  ”  and  “  civilisation.”  It  is  the  first  that 
is  really  vital  and  profitable;  a  “civilisation”  is  the  de¬ 
caying  later  stage  of  a  “culture,”  its  inevitable  fate. 
Herein  it  reaches  its  climax.  “Civilisations  are  the 
most  externalised  and  artistic  conditions  of  which  the 
higher  embodiment  of  Man  is  capable.  They  are  a 
spiritual  senility,  an  end  which  with  inner  necessity  is 
reached  again  and  again.”  2  The  transition  from  “cul¬ 
ture”  to  “civilisation”  in  ancient  times  took  place, 
Spengler  holds,  in  the  fourth  century,  and  in  the  mod¬ 
ern  West  in  the  nineteenth.  But,  like  Petrie,  though 

1  Oswald  Spengler,  Der  Untergang  des  Abendlandes,  vol.  1  (1918);  vol. 
II  (1922). 

2  In  an  interesting  pamphlet,  Pessimismus?  Spengler  has  since  pointed 
out  that  he  does  not  regard  his  argument  as  pessimistic.  The  end  of  a 
civilisation  is  its  fulfilment,  and  there  is  still  much  to  be  achieved  (though 
not,  he  thinks,  along  the  line  of  art)  before  our  own  civilisation  is  fulfilled. 
With  Spengler's  conception  of  that  fulfilment  we  may,  however,  fail  to 
•ympathise. 


3io 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


more  implicitly,  he  recognises  the  prominent  place  of  the 
art  activities  in  the  whole  process,  and  he  explicitly  em¬ 
phasises  the  interesting  way  in  which  those  activities 
which  are  generally  regarded  as  of  the  nature  of  art  are 
interwoven  with  others  not  so  generally  regarded. 

ill 

However  we  look  at  it,  we  see  that  Man,  whether  he 
works  individually  or  collectively,  may  conveniently 
be  regarded,  in  the  comprehensive  sense,  as  an  artist,  a 
bad  artist,  maybe,  for  the  most  part,  but  still  an  artist. 
His  civilisation  —  if  that  is  the  term  we  choose  to  ap¬ 
ply  to  the  total  sum  of  his  group  activities  —  is  always 
an  art,  or  a  complex  of  arts.  It  is  an  art  that  is  to 
be  measured,  or  left  immeasurable.  That  question,  we 
have  seen,  we  may  best  leave  open.  Another  question 
that  might  be  put  is  easy  to  deal  with  more  summarily: 
What  is  Art? 

We  may  deal  with  it  summarily  because  it  is  an  ul¬ 
timate  question  and  there  can  be  no  final  answer  to 
ultimate  questions.  As  soon  as  we  begin  to  ask  such 
questions,  as  soon  as  we  begin  to  look  at  any  phenom¬ 
enon  as  an  end  in  itself,  we  are  on  the  perilous  slope 
of  metaphysics,  where  no  agreement  can,  or  should  be, 
possible.  The  question  of  measurement  was  plausible, 
and  needed  careful  consideration.  What  is  Art?  is  a 
question  which,  if  we  are  wise,  we  shall  deal  with  as 
Pilate  dealt  with  that  like  question:  What  is  Truth? 

How  futile  the  question  is,  we  may  realise  when  we 


CONCLUSION 


311 

examine  the  book  which  Tolstoy  in  old  age  wrote  to  an¬ 
swer  it.  Here  is  a  man  who  was  himself,  in  his  own 
field,  one  of  the  world’s  supreme  artists.  He  could  not 
fail  to  say  one  or  two  true  things,  as  when  he  points  out 
that  “all  human  existence  is  full  of  art,  from  cradle 
songs  and  dances  to  the  offices  of  religion  and  public 
ceremonial  —  it  is  all  equally  art.  Art,  in  the  large 
sense,  impregnates  our  whole  life.”  But  on  the  main 
point  all  that  Tolstoy  can  do  is  to  bring  together  a 
large  miscellaneous  collection  of  definitions  —  without 
seeing  that  as  individual  opinions  they  all  have  their 
rightness  —  and  then  to  add  one  of  his  own,  not  much 
worse,  nor  much  better,  than  any  of  the  others. 
Thereto  he  appends  some  of  his  own  opinions  on  art¬ 
ists,  whence  it  appears  that  Hugo,  Dickens,  George  El¬ 
iot,  Dostoievsky,  Maupassant,  Millet,  Rastien-Lepage, 
and  Jules  Breton  —  and  not  always  they  —  are  the  art¬ 
ists  whom  he  considers  great;  it  is  not  a  list  to  treat 
with  contempt,  but  he  goes  on  to  pour  contempt  on 
those  who  venerate  Sophocles  and  Aristophanes  and 
Dante  and  Shakespeare  and  Milton  and  Michelangelo 
and  Bach  and  Beethoven  and  Manet.  “My  own  artis¬ 
tic  works,”  he  adds,  “  I  rank  among  bad  art,  excepting 
a  few  short  stories.”  It  seems  a  reduction  of  the  whole 
question,  What  is  Art?  to  absurdity,  if  one  may  be  per¬ 
mitted  to  say  so  at  a  time  when  Tolstoy  would  appear 
to  be  the  pioneer  of  some  of  our  most  approved  modern 
critics. 

Thus  we  see  the  reason  why  all  the  people  who  come 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


312 

forward  to  define  art  —  each  with  his  own  little 
measuring-rod  quite  different  from  everybody  else’s 
• —  inevitably  make  themselves  ridiculous.  It  is  true 
they  are  all  of  them  right.  That  is  just  why  they  are 
ridiculous:  each  has  mistaken  the  one  drop  of  water  he 
has  measured  for  the  whole  ocean.  Art  cannot  be 
defined  because  it  is  infinite.  It  is  no  accident  that 
poetry,  which  has  so  often  seemed  the  typical  art, 
means  a  making.  The  artist  is  a  maker.  Art  is  merely 
a  name  we  are  pleased  to  give  to  what  can  only  be  the 
whole  stream  of  action  which  —  in  order  to  impart  to 
it  selection  and  an  unconscious  or  even  conscious  aim 
■ —  is  poured  through  the  nervous  circuit  of  a  human 
animal  or  some  other  animal  having  a  more  or  less 
similar  nervous  organisation.  For  a  cat  is  an  artist  as 
well  as  a  man,  and  some  would  say  more  than  a  man, 
while  a  bee  is  not  only  an  obvious  artist,  but  perhaps 
even  the  typical  natural  and  unconscious  artist. 
There  is  no  defining  art;  there  is  only  the  attempt  to 
distinguish  between  good  art  and  bad  art. 

Thus  it  is  that  I  find  no  escape  from  the  Aristotelian 
position  of  Shakespeare  that 

**  Nature  is  made  better  by  no  mean 
But  Nature  makes  that  mean  .  . . 

This  is  an  art 

Which  does  mend  Nature,  change  it  rather,  but 
The  art  itself  is  Nature.” 

And  that  this  conception  is  Aristotelian,  even  the 
essential  Greek  conception,  is  no  testimony  to  Shake¬ 
speare’s  scholarship.  It  is  merely  the  proof  that  here 


CONCLUSION 


3i3 


we  are  in  the  presence  of  one  of  these  great  ultimate 
facts  of  the  world  which  cannot  but  be  sensitively  per¬ 
ceived  by  the  finest  spirits,  however  far  apart  in  time 
and  space.  Aristotle,  altogether  in  the  same  spirit  as 
Shakespeare,  insisted  that  the  works  of  man’s  making, 
a  State,  for  example,  are  natural,  though  Art  partly 
completes  what  Nature  is  herself  sometimes  unable  to 
bring  to  perfection,  and  even  then  that  man  is  onl}7 
exercising  methods  which,  after  all,  are  those  of  Nature. 
Nature  needs  Man’s  art  in  order  to  achieve  many 
natural  things,  and  Man,  in  fulfilling  that  need,  is 
only  following  the  guidance  of  Nature  in  seeming  to 
make  things  which  are  all  the  time  growing  by  them¬ 
selves.1  Art  is  thus  scarcely  more  than  the  natural 
midwife  of  Nature. 

There  is,  however,  one  distinguishing  mark  of  Art 
which  at  this  stage,  as  we  conclude  our  survey,  must  be 
clearly  indicated.  It  has  been  subsumed,  as  the  acute 
reader  will  not  have  failed  to  note,  throughout.  But  it 
has,  for  the  most  part,  been  deliberately  left  implicit. 
It  has  constantly  been  assumed,  that  is  to  say,  that 
Art  is  the  sum  of  all  the  active  energies  of  Mankind. 
We  must  in  this  matter  of  necessity  follow  Aristotle, 
who  in  his  “Politics”  spoke,  as  a  matter  of  course,  of 
all  those  who  practice  “medicine,  gymnastics,  and  the 
arts  in  general”  as  “artists.”  Art  is  the  moulding 
force  of  every  culture  that  Man  during  his  long  course 

*  See,  for  instance,  W.  L.  Newman,  The  Politics  of  Aristotle,  vol.  1,  p. 
Kox,  and  S.  H.  Butcher,  Aristotle's  Theory  of  Poetry  and  Pme  Art,  p.  119, 


314 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


has  at  any  time  or  place  produced.  It  is  the  reality  of 
what  we  imperfectly  term  “  morality.”  It  is  all  human 
creation. 

Yet  creation,  in  the  active  visible  constructive  sense, 
is  not  the  whole  of  Man.  It  is  not  even  the  whole  of 
what  Man  has  been  accustomed  to  call  God.  When, 
by  what  is  now  termed  a  process  of  Narcissism,  Man 
created  God  in  his  own  image,  as  we  may  instructively 
observe  in  the  first  chapter  of  the  Hebrew  Book  of 
Genesis,  he  assigned  to  him  six  parts  of  active  crea¬ 
tional  work,  one  part  of  passive  contemplation  of  that 
work.  That  one  seventh  part  —  and  an  immensely 
important  part  —  has  not  come  under  our  considera¬ 
tion.  In  other  words,  we  have  been  looking  at  Man 
the  artist,  not  at  Man  the  aesthetician. 

There  was  more  than  one  reason  why  these  two 
aspects  of  human  faculty  were  held  clearly  apart 
throughout  our  discussion.  Not  only  is  it  even  less  pos¬ 
sible  to  agree  about  aesthetics,  where  the  variety  of  in¬ 
dividual  judgment  is  rightly  larger,  than  about  art  (an¬ 
cient  and  familiar  is  the  saying,  De  gustibus  —  ),  but  to 
confuse  art  and  aesthetics  leads  us  into  lamentable  con¬ 
fusion.  We  may  note  this  in  the  pioneers  of  the  mod¬ 
ern  revival  of  what  Sidgwick  called  “aesthetic  Intui- 
tlonism”  in  the  eighteenth  century,  and  especially  in 
Hutcheson,  though  Hutcheson’s  work  is  independent 
of  consistency,  which  he  can  scarcely  even  be  said  to 
have  sought.  They  never  sufficiently  emphasised  the 
distinction  between  art  and  aesthetics,  between,  that  is 


CONCLUSION 


3*5 


to  say,  what  we  may  possibly,  if  we  like,  call  the  dy¬ 
namic  and  the  static  aspects  of  human  action.  Herein 
is  the  whole  difference  between  work,  for  art  is  essen¬ 
tially  work,  and  the  spectacular  contemplation  of  work, 
which  aesthetics  essentially  is.  The  two  things  are  ul¬ 
timately  one,  but  alike  in  the  special  arts  and  in  that 
art  of  life  commonly  spoken  of  as  morals,  where  we  are 
not  usually  concerned  with  ultimates,  the  two  must  be 
clearly  held  apart.  From  the  point  of  view  of  art  we 
are  concerned  with  the  internal  impulse  to  guide  the  ac¬ 
tivities  in  the  lines  of  good  work.  It  is  only  when  we 
look  at  the  work  of  art  from  the  outside,  whether  in  the 
more  specialised  arts  or  in  the  art  of  life,  that  we  are 
concerned  with  aesthetic  contemplation,  that  activity 
of  vision  which  creates  beauty,  however  we  may  please 
to  define  beauty,  and  even  though  we  see  it  so  widely 
as  to  be  able  to  say  with  Remy  de  Gourmont:  “  Wher¬ 
ever  life  is,  there  is  beauty,"  1  provided,  one  may  add, 
that  there  is  the  aesthetic  contemplation  in  which  it 
must  be  mirrored. 

It  is  in  relation  with  art,  not  with  aesthetics,  it  may 


1  Beauty  is  a  dangerous  conception  to  deal  with,  and  the  remembrance 
of  this  great  saying  may,  perhaps,  help  to  save  us  from  the  degrading  no¬ 
tion  that  beauty  merely  inheres  in  objects,  or  has  anything  to  do  with  the 
prim  and  smooth  conventions  which  make  prettiness.  Even  in  the  fine 
art  of  painting  it  is  more  reasonable  to  regard  prettiness  as  the  negation 
of  beauty.  It  is  possible  to  find  beauty  in  Degas  and  C6zanne,  but  not  in 
Bouguereau  or  Cabanel.  The  path  of  beauty  is  not  soft  and  smooth, 
but  full  of  harshness  and  asperity.  It  is  a  rose  that  grows  only  on  a  bush 
covered  with  thorns.  As  of  goodness  and  of  truth,  men  talk  too  lightly 
of  Beauty.  Only  to  the  bravest  and  skilfullest  is  it  given  to  break  through 
the  briers  oi  her  palace  and  kiss  at  last  her  enchanted  lips- 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


3*6 

be  noted  in  passing,  that  we  are  concerned  with  mor¬ 
als.  That  was  once  a  question  of  seemingly  such  im¬ 
mense  import  that  men  were  willing  to  spiritually  slay 
each  other  over  it.  But  it  is  not  a  question  at  all  from 
the  standpoint  which  has  here  from  the  outset  been 
taken.  Morals,  for  us  to-day,  is  a  species  of  which  art 
is  the  genus.  It  is  an  art,  and  like  all  arts  it  necessarily 
has  its  own  laws.  We  are  concerned  with  the  art  of  mor¬ 
als:  we  cannot  speak  of  art  and  morals.  To  take  “  art  ” 
and  “morals”  and  “religion,”  and  stir  them  up,  how¬ 
ever  vigorously,  into  an  indigestible  plum-pudding,  as 
Ruskin  used  to  do,  is  no  longer  possible.1  This  is  a  ques¬ 
tion  which  —  like  so  many  other  furiously  debated 
questions  —  only  came  into  existence  because  the  dis¬ 
putants  on  both  sides  were  ignorant  of  the  matter  they 
were  disputing  about.  It  is  no  longer  to  be  taken  seri¬ 
ously,  though  it  has  its  interest  because  the  dispute  has 
so  often  recurred,  not  only  in  recent  days,  but  equally 
among  the  Greeks  of  Plato’s  days.  The  Greeks  had  a 
kind  of  aesthetic  morality.  It  was  instinctive  with  them, 
and  that  is  why  it  is  so  significant  for  us.  But  they 
seldom  seem  to  have  succeeded  in  thinking  aesthetic 

1  Ruskin  was  what  Spinoza  has  been  called,  a  God-intoxicated  man; 
he  had  a  gift  of  divine  rhapsody,  which  reached  at  times  to  inspiration. 
But  it  is  not  enough  to  be  God-intoxicated,  for  into  him  whose  mind  is 
disorderly  and  ignorant  and  ill-disciplined  the  Gods  pour  their  wine  in 
vain.  Spinoza's  mind  was  not  of  that  kind,  Ruskin 's  too  often  was,  so 
that  Ruskin  can  never  be,  like  Spinoza,  a  permanent  force  in  the  world  of 
thought.  His  interest  is  outside  that  field,  mainly  perhaps  psychological 
in  the  precise  notation  of  a  particular  kind  of  aesthetic  sensibility.  The 
admiration  of  Ruskin  cherished  by  Proust,  himself  a  supreme  master  in 
this  held,  is  significant. 


CONCLUSION 


3*7 


problems  clearly  out.  The  attitude  of  their  philoso¬ 
phers  towards  many  of  the  special  arts,  even  the  arts  in 
which  they  were  themselves  supreme,  to  us  seem  un¬ 
reasonable.  While  they  magnified  the  art,  they  often 
belittled  the  artist,  and  felt  an  aristocratic  horror  for 
anything  that  assimilated  a  man  to  a  craftsman;  for 
craftsman  meant  for  them  vulgarian.  Plato  himself 
was  all  for  goody-goody  literature  and  in  our  days 
would  be  an  enthusiastic  patron  of  Sunday-school  sto¬ 
ries.  He  would  forbid  any  novelist  to  represent  a  good 
man  as  ever  miserable  or  a  wicked  man  as  ever  happy. 
The  whole  tendency  of  the  discussion  in  the  third  book 
of  the  “  Republic”  is  towards  the  conclusion  that  litera¬ 
ture  must  be  occupied  exclusively  with  the  representa¬ 
tion  of  the  virtuous  man,  provided,  of  course,  that  he 
was  not  a  slave  or  a  craftsman,  for  to  such  no  virtue 
worthy  of  imitation  should  ever  be  attributed.  To¬ 
wards  the  end  of  his  long  life,  Plato  remained  of  the 
same  opinion;  in  the  second  book  of  “The  Laws”  it  is 
with  the  maxims  of  virtue  that  he  will  have  the  poet 
solely  concerned.  The  reason  for  this  ultra-puritanical 
attitude,  which  was  by  no  means  in  practice  that  of  the 
Greeks  themselves,  seems  not  hard  to  divine.  The  very 
fact  that  their  morality  was  temperamentally  aesthetic 
instinctively  impelled  them,  when  they  were  thinking 
philosophically,  to  moralise  art  generally;  they  had  not 
yet  reached  the  standpoint  which  would  enable  them 
to  see  that  art  might  be  consonant  with  morality  with¬ 
out  being  artificially  pressed  into  a  narrow  moral  mould. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


318 

Aristotle  was  conspicuously  among  those,  if  not  the 
first,  who  took  a  broader  and  saner  view.  In  opposi¬ 
tion  to  the  common  Greek  view  that  the  object  of  art 
is  to  teach  morals,  Aristotle  clearly  expressed  the  to¬ 
tally  different  view  that  poetry  in  the  wide  sense  —  the 
special  art  which  he  and  the  Greeks  generally  were 
alone  much  concerned  to  discuss  —  is  an  emotional  de¬ 
light,  having  pleasure  as  its  direct  end,  and  only  indi¬ 
rectly  a  moral  end  by  virtue  of  its  cathartic  effects. 
Therein  he  reached  an  aesthetic  standpoint,  yet  it  was  so 
novel  that  he  could  not  securely  retain  it  and  was  con¬ 
stantly  falling  back  towards  the  old  moral  conception 
of  art.1 

We  may  call  it  a  step  in  advance.  Yet  it  was  not  a 
complete  statement  of  the  matter.  Indeed,  it  estab¬ 
lished  the  unreal  conflict  between  two  opposing  concep¬ 
tions,  each  unsound  because  incomplete,  which  loose 
thinkers  have  carried  on  ever  since.  To  assert  that  poe¬ 
try  exists  for  morals  is  merely  to  assert  that  one  art  ex¬ 
ists  for  the  sake  of  another  art,  which  at  the  best  is 
rather  a  futile  statement,  while,  so  far  as  it  is  really  ac¬ 
cepted,  it  cannot  fail  to  crush  the  art  thus  subordi¬ 
nated.  If  we  have  the  insight  to  see  that  an  art  has  its 
own  part  of  life,  we  shall  also  see  that  it  has  its  own  in¬ 
trinsic  morality,  which  cannot  be  the  morality  of  morals 

1  Butcher,  Aristotle's  Theory  of  Poetry  and  Fine  Art,  chap,  v,  “Art 
and  Morals.”  Aristotle  could  have  accepted  the  almost  Freudian  view  of 
Croce  that  art  is  the  deliverer,  the  process  through  which  we  overcome 
the  stress  of  inner  experiences  by  objectifying  them  {/. Esthetics  as  Science 
of  Expression,  p.  35).  But  Plato  could  not  accept  Croce,  still  less  Freud. 


CONCLUSION 


3*9 


or  of  any  other  art  than  itself.  We  may  here  profitably 
bear  in  mind  that  antinomy  between  morals  and  moral¬ 
ity  on  which  Jules  de  Gaultier  has  often  insisted.  The 
Puritan’s  strait- jacket  shows  the  vigour  of  his  external 
morals;  it  also  bears  witness  to  the  lack  of  internal 
morality  which  necessitates  that  control.  Again,  on 
the  other  hand,  it  is  argued  that  art  gives  pleasure. 
Very  true.  Even  the  art  of  morals  gives  pleasure.  But 
to  assert  that  therein  lies  its  sole  end  and  aim  is  an 
altogether  feeble  and  inadequate  conclusion,  unless 
we  go  further  and  proceed  to  inquire  what  “ pleasure’’ 
means.  If  we  fail  to  take  that  further  step,  it  remains 
a  conclusion  which  may  be  said  to  merge  into  the  con¬ 
clusion  that  art  is  aimless;  that,  rather,  its  aim  is  to  be 
aimless,  and  so  to  lift  us  out  of  the  struggle  and  tur¬ 
moil  of  life.  That  was  the  elaborately  developed  argu¬ 
ment  of  Schopenhauer :  art  —  whether  in  music,  in 
philosophy,  in  painting,  in  poetry  —  is  useless;  “to  be 
useless  is  the  mark  of  genius,  its  patent  of  nobility.  All 
other  works  of  men  are  there  for  the  preservation  or  al¬ 
leviation  of  our  existence;  but  this  alone  not;  it  alone  is 
there  for  its  own  sake;  and  is  in  this  sense  to  be  re¬ 
garded  as  the  flower,  or  the  pure  essence,  of  existence*. 
That  is  why  in  its  enjoyment  our  heart  rises,  for  we  are 
thereby  lifted  above  the  heavy  earthen  atmosphere  of 
necessity.”1  Life  is  a  struggle  of  the  will;  but  in  art 
the  will  has  become  objective,  fit  for  pure  contempla- 

1  Schopenhauer,  Die  Welt  als  Wille  and  Vorstcllung  (1859),  vol.  11, 
p.  442.  For  a  careful  and  detailed  study  of  Schopenhauer’s  conception 
of  art,  see  A.  Fauconnet,  L'Esthetique  de  Schopenhauer  (1913). 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


320 

tion,  and  genius  consists  in  an  eminent  aptitude  for 
contemplation.  The  ordinary  man,  said  Schopenhauer, 
plods  through  the  dark  world  with  his  lantern  turned  on 
the  things  he  wants ;  the  man  of  genius  sees  the  world 
by  the  light  of  the  sun.  In  modern  times  Bergson 
adopted  that  view  of  Schopenhauer's,  with  a  terminol¬ 
ogy  of  his  own,  and  all  he  said  under  this  head  may  be 
regarded  as  a  charming  fantasia  on  the  Schopenhauer- 
ian  theme:  “Genius  is  the  most  complete  objectivity.’ ’ 
Most  of  us,  it  seems  to  Bergson,  never  see  reality  at  all; 
we  only  see  the  labels  we  have  fixed  on  things  to  mark 
for  us  their  usefulness.1  A  veil  is  interposed  between  us 
and  the  reality  of  things.  The  artist,  the  man  of  genius, 
raises  this  veil  and  reveals  Nature  to  us.  He  is  naturally 
endowed  with  a  detachment  from  life,  and  so  possesses 
as  it  were  a  virginal  freshness  in  seeing,  hearing,  or 
thinking.  That  is  “intuition,”  an  instinct  that  has  be¬ 
come  disinterested.  “Art  has  no  other  object  but  to  re¬ 
move  the  practically  useful  symbols,  the  conventional 
and  socially  accepted  generalities,  so  as  to  bring  us  face 
to  face  with  reality  itself.” 2  Art  would  thus  be  fulfill- 

1  I  find  that  I  have  here  negligently  ascribed  to  Bergson  a  metaphor 
which  belongs  to  Croce,  who  at  this  point  says  the  same  thing  as  Bergson, 
though  he  gives  it  a  different  name.  In  Esthetics  as  Science  of  Expression 
(English  translation,  p.  66)  we  read:  “The  world  of  which  as  a  rule  we 
have  intuition  [Bergson  could  not  have  used  that  word  here]  is  a  small 
thing.  .  .  .  ‘Here  is  a  man,  here  is  a  horse,  this  i9  heavy,  this  is  hard,  this 
pleases  me,’  etc.  It  is  a  medley  of  light  and  colour,  which  could  not 
pictorially  attain  to  any  more  sincere  expression  than  a  haphazard  splash 
of  colour,  from  among  which  would  with  difficulty  stand  out  a  few  special 
distinctive  traits.  This  and  nothing  else  is  what  we  possess  in  our  ordi¬ 
nary  life;  this  is  the  basis  of  our  ordinary  action.  It  is  the  index  of  a 
book.  The  labels  tied  to  things  take  the  place  of  things  themselves.” 

*  H.  Bergson,  Le  Rire.  For  a  clear,  concise,  and  sympathetic  exposi- 


CONCLUSION 


321 

ing  its  function  the  more  completely  the  further  it  re¬ 
moved  us  from  ordinary  life,  or,  more  strictly,  from 
any  personal  interest  in  life.  That  was  also  Remy  de 
Gourmont’s  opinion,  though  I  do  not  know  how  far  he 
directly  derived  it  from  Schopenhauer.  “If  we  give  to 
art  a  moral  aim,”  he  wrote,  “it  ceases  to  exist,  for  it 
ceases  to  be  useless.  Art  is  incompatible  with  a  moral 
or  religious  aim.  It  is  unintelligible  to  the  crowd  be¬ 
cause  the  crowd  is  not  disinterested  and  knows  only  the 
principle  of  utility.”  But  the  difficulty  of  making  defi¬ 
nite  affirmation  in  this  field,  the  perpetual  need  to 
allow  for  nuances  which  often  on  the  surface  involve 
contradictions,  is  seen  when  we  find  that  so  great  an 
artist  as  Einstein  —  for  so  we  may  here  fairly  call  him 
—  and  one  so  little  of  a  formal  aesthetician,  agrees  with 
Schopenhauer.  “  I  agree  with  Schopenhauer,”  he  said 
to  Moszkowski,  “that  one  of  the  most  powerful  mo¬ 
tives  that  attract  people  to  science  and  art  is  the  long¬ 
ing  to  escape  from  everyday  life,  with  its  painful  coarse¬ 
ness  and  unconsoling  barrenness,  and  to  break  the 
fetters  of  their  own  ever-changing  desires.  Man  seeks 
to  form  a  simplified  synoptical  view  of  the  world  con¬ 
formable  to  his  own  nature,  to  overcome  the  world  by 
replacing  it  with  his  picture.  The  painter,  the  poet, 
the  philosopher,  the  scientist,  each  does  this  in  his  own 
way.  He  transfers  the  centre  of  his  emotional  life  to 
this  picture,  to  find  a  surer  haven  of  peace  than  the 

tion  of  Bergson’s  standpoint,  though  without  special  reference  to  art, 
see  Karin  Stephen,  The  Misuse  of  Minui. 


322 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


sphere  of  his  turbulent  personal  experience  offers.” 
That  is  a  sound  statement  of  the  facts,  yet  it  is  absurd 
to  call  such  an  achievement  “useless.” 

Perhaps,  however,  what  philosophers  have  really 
meant  when  they  have  said  that  art  (it  is  the  so-called 
fine  arts  only  that  they  have  in  mind)  is  useless,  is  that 
an  art  must  not  be  consciously  pursued  for  any  primary 
useful  end  outside  itself.  That  is  true.  It  is  even  true  of 
morals,  that  is  to  say  the  art  of  living.  To  live  in  the 
conscious  primary  pursuit  of  a  “  useful  ”  end  —  such  as 
one  of  the  fine  arts  —  outside  living  itself  is  to  live 
badly;  to  declare,  like  Andr6  Gide,  that  “outside  the 
doctrine  of  ‘Art  for  Art’  I  know  not  where  to  find  any 
reason  for  living,”  may  well  be  the  legitimate  expres¬ 
sion  of  a  personal  feeling,  but,  unless  understood  in  the 
sense  here  taken,  it  is  not  a  philosophical  statement 
which  can  be  brought  under  the  species  of  eternity,  be¬ 
ing,  indeed,  one  of  those  confusions  of  substances  which 
are,  metaphysically,  damnable.  So,  again,  in  the  art 
of  science:  the  most  useful  applications  of  science  have 
sprung  from  discoveries  that  were  completely  useless 
for  purposes  outside  pure  science,  so  far  as  the  aim  of 
the  discoverer  went,  or  even  so  far  as  he  ever  knew.  If 
he  had  been  bent  on  “useful”  ends,  he  would  probably 
have  made  no  discovery  at  all.  But  the  bare  statement 
that  “art  is  useless”  is  so  vague  as  to  be  really  mean¬ 
ingless,  if  not  inaccurate  and  misleading. 

Therefore,  Nietzsche  was  perhaps  making  a  pro¬ 
found  statement  when  he  declared  that  art  is  the 


CONCLUSION 


323 


great  stimulus  to  life;  it  produces  joy  as  an  aid  to  life; 
it  possesses  a  usefulness,  that  is  to  say,  which  tran¬ 
scends  its  direct  aim.  The  artist  is  one  wffio  sees  life  as 
beauty,  and  art  is  thus  fulfilling  its  function  the  more 
completely,  the  more  deeply  it  enables  us  to  penetrate 
into  life.  It  seems,  however,  that  Nietzsche  insuffi¬ 
ciently  guarded  his  statement.  Art  for  art’s  sake,  said 
Nietzsche,  is  “a  dangerous  principle,”  like  truth  for 
truth’s  sake  and  goodness  for  goodness’  sake.  Art, 
knowledge,  and  morality  are  simply  means,  he  de¬ 
clared,  and  valuable  for  their  “life-promoting  tend¬ 
ency.”  (There  is  here  a  pioneering  suggestion  of  the 
American  doctrine  of  Pragmatism,  according  to  which 
how  a  thing  “works”  is  the  test  of  its  validity,  but 
Nietzsche  can  by  no  means  be  counted  a  Pragmatist.) 
To  look  thus  at  the  matter  was  certainly,  with  Scho¬ 
penhauer  and  with  Gourmont,  to  put  aside  the  super¬ 
ficial  moral  function  of  art,  and  to  recognise  in  it  a 
larger  sociological  function.  It  was  on  the  sociological 
function  of  art  that  Guyau,  who  was  so  penetrating  and 
sympathetic  a  thinker,  insisted  in  his  book,  posthu¬ 
mously  published  in  1889,  “  L’Art  au  Point  de  Vue  Soci- 
ologique.”  He  argued  that  art,  while  remaining  inde¬ 
pendent,  is  at  the  foundation  one  with  morals  and  with 
religion.  He  believed  in  a  profound  unity  of  all  these 
terms:  life,  morality,  society,  religion,  art.  “Art,  in  a 
word,  is  life.”  So  that,  as  he  pointed  out,  there  is  no 
conflict  between  the  theory  of  art  for  art,  properly  inter¬ 
preted,  and  the  theory  that  assigns  to  art  a  moral  and 


324  '  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

soda!  function.  It  is  clear  that  Guyau  was  on  the  right 
road,  although  his  statement  was  confusingly  awkward 
in  form.  He  deformed  his  statement,  moreover,  through 
his  perpetual  tendency  to  insist  on  the  spontaneously 
socialising  organisation  of  human  groups  —  a  tend¬ 
ency  which  has  endeared  him  to  all  who  adopt  an  an¬ 
archist  conception  of  society  —  and,  forgetting  that  he 
had  placed  morals  only  at  the  depth  of  art  and  not  on 
the  surface,  he  commits  himself  to  the  supremely  false 
dictum:  “Art  is,  above  everything,  a  phenomenon  of 
sociability,’'  and  the  like  statements,  far  too  closely  re¬ 
sembling  the  doctrinary  pronouncements  of  Tolstoy. 
For  sociability  is  an  indirect  end  of  art:  it  cannot  be  its 
direct  aim.  We  are  here  not  far  from  the  ambiguous 
doctrine  that  art  is  “expression,”  for  “expression”  may 
be  too  easily  confused  with  “communication.”  1 

All  these  eminent  philosophers  —  though  they  meant 
something  which  so  far  as  it  went  was  true  —  have 
failed  to  produce  a  satisfying  statement  because  they 
have  none  of  them  understood  how  to  ask  the  question 
which  they  were  trying  to  answer.  They  failed  to  un¬ 
derstand  that  morals  is  just  as  much  an  art  as  any  other 
vital  psychic  function  of  man ;  they  failed  to  see  that, 
though  art  must  be  free  from  the  dominance  of  morals, 

1  This  may  seem  to  cast  a  critical  reflection  on  Croce.  Let  me,  there¬ 
fore,  hasten  to  add  that  it  is  merely  the  personal  impression  that  Croce, 
for  all  his  virtuous  aspirations  after  the  concrete,  tends  to  fall  into  verbal 
abstraction.  He  so  often  reminds  one  of  that  old  lady  who  used  to  find 
(for  she  died  during  the  Great  War)  such  spiritual  consolation  in  “that 
blessed  word  Mesopotamia,”  This  refers,  however,  to  the  earlier  mor<$ 
than  to  the  later  Croce. 


CONCLUSION 


3^5 


it  by  no  means  followed  that  it  has  no  morality  of  its 
own,  if  morality  involves  the  organised  integrity  which 
all  vital  phenomena  must  possess;  they  failed  to  realise 
that,  since  the  arts  are  simply  the  sum  of  the  active 
functions  which  spring  out  of  the  single  human  organ¬ 
ism,  we  are  not  called  upon  to  worry  over  any  imagi¬ 
nary  conflicts  between  functions  which  are  necessarily 
harmonious  because  they  are  all  one  at  the  root.  We 
cannot  too  often  repeat  the  pregnant  maxim  of  Bacon 
that  the  right  question  is  the  half  of  knowledge.  Here 
we  might  almost  say  that  it  is  the  whole  of  knowledge. 
It  seems,  therefore,  unnecessary  to  pursue  the  subject 
further.  He  who  cannot  himself  pursue  it  further  had 
best  leave  it  alone. 

But  when  we  enter  the  aesthetic  sphere  we  are  no 
longer  artists.  That,  indeed,  is  inevitable  if  we  regard 
the  arts  as  the  sum  of  all  the  active  functions  of  the 
organism.  Rickert,  with  his  methodical  vision  of  the 
world,  —  for  he  insists  that  we  must  have  some  sort  of 
system,  —  has  presented  what  he  regards  as  a  reason¬ 
able  scheme  in  a  tabular  form  at  the  end  of  the  first 
volume  of  his  “System.”  1  He  divides  Reality  into  two 
great  divisions:  the  monistic  and  asocial  Contempla¬ 
tive  and  the  pluralistic  and  social  Active.  To  the  first 
belong  the  spheres  of  Logic,  ^Esthetics,  and  Mysticism, 
with  their  values,  truth,  beauty,  impersonal  holiness; 
to  the  second,  Ethics,  Erotics,  the  Philosophy  of  Reli¬ 
gion,  with  their  values,  morality,  happiness,  personal 
1  H.  Rickert,  System  der  Philcscpku,  vol.  1  (1921). 


326  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

holiness.  This  view  of  the  matter  is  the  more  signify 
cant  as  Rickert  stands  aside  from  the  tradition  repre- 
sen  ted  by  Nietzsche  and  returns  to  the  Kantian  current, 
enriched,  indeed,  and  perhaps  not  quite  consistently, 
by  Goethe.  It  seems  probable  that  all  Rickert’s  active 
attitudes  towards  reality  may  fairly  be  called  Art,  and 
all  the  contemplative  attitudes,  /Esthetics. 

There  is  in  fact  nothing  novel  in  the  distinction 
which  underlies  this  classification,  and  it  has  been 
recognised  ever  since  the  days  of  Baumgarten,  the 
commonly  accepted  founder  of  modern  aesthetics,  not 
to  go  further  back.1  Art  is  the  active  practical  exercise 
of  a  single  discipline :  aesthetics  is  the  philosophic  appre¬ 
ciation  of  any  or  all  the  arts.  Art  is  concerned  with 
the  more  or  less  unconscious  creation  of  beauty: 
aesthetics  is  concerned  with  its  discovery  and  con¬ 
templation.  ^Esthetics  is  the  metaphysical  side  of  all 
productive  living. 


IV 

This  complete  unlikeness  on  the  surface  between  arf 
and  aesthetics  —  for  ultimately  and  fundamentally  they 

1  Before  Baumgarten  this  distinction  seems  to  have  been  recognised, 
though  too  vaguely  and  inconsistently,  by  Hutcheson,  who  is  so  often 
regarded  as  the  real  founder  of  modern  aesthetics.  W.  R.  Scott  ( Francis 
Hutcheson ,  p.  216)  points  out  these  two  principles  in  Hutcheson’s  work, 
“the  Internal  Senses,  as  derived  from  Reflection,  representing  the  atti¬ 
tude  of  the  ‘Spectator’  or  observer  in  a  picture  gallery  while,  on  the  other 
hand,  as  deduced  from  eMpyeia  they  find  a  parallel  in  the  artist’s  own 
consciousness  of  success  in  his  work  thus  the  former  might  be  called 
static  and  the  latter  dynamic  consciousness,  or,  in  the  special  case  of 
Morality,  the  first  applies  primarily  to  approval  of  the  acts  of  others,  the 
second  to  each  individual’s  approval  of  his  own  conduct.” 


CONCLUSION 


327 


are  at  one  —  has  to  be  emphasised,  for  the  failure  to 
distinguish  them  has  led  to  confusion  and  verbosity. 
The  practice  of  morals,  we  must  ever  remember,  is  not 
a  matter  of  aesthetics;  it  is  a  matter  of  art.  It  has  not, 
nor  has  any  other  art,  an  immediate  and  obvious  re¬ 
lationship  to  the  creation  of  beauty.1  What  the  artist 
in  life,  as  in  any  other  art,  is  directly  concerned  to 
express  is  not  primarily  beauty;  it  is  much  more  likely 
to  seem  to  him  to  be  truth  (it  is  interesting  to  note  that 
Einstein,  so  much  an  artist  in  thought,  insists  that  he 
is  simply  concerned  with  truth),  and  what  he  produces 
may  seem  at  first  to  all  the  world,  and  even  possibly  to 
himself,  to  be  ugly.  It  is  so  in  the  sphere  of  morals. 
For  morals  is  still  concerned  with  the  possessive  in¬ 
stinct,  not  with  the  creation  of  beauty,  with  the  needs 
and  the  satisfaction  of  the  needs,  with  the  industrial 
and  economic  activities,  with  the  military  activities  to 
which  they  fatally  tend.  But  the  aesthetic  attitude,  as 
Gaultier  expresses  it,  is  the  radiant  smile  on  the  human 
face  which  in  its  primitive  phases  was  anatomically 
built  up  to  subserve  crude  vital  needs;  as  he  elsewhere 
more  abstractly  expresses  it,  “  Beauty  is  an  attitude  of 
sensibility.”  It  is  the  task  of  aesthetics,  often  a  slow 
and  painful  task,  to  see  art  —  including  the  art  of 
Nature,  some  would  insist  —  as  beauty.  That,  it  has 

1  This  would  probably  be  recognised  even  by  those  moralists  who, 
like  Hutcheson,  in  their  anxiety  to  make  clear  an  important  relationship, 
have  spoken  ambiguously.  “Probably  Hutcheson’s  real  thought,” 
remarks  F.  C.  Sharp  {Mind,  1921,  p.  42),  “is  that  the  moral  emotion, 
while  possessing  many  important  affinities  with  the  aesthetic,  is  in  tha 
last  resort  different  in  content.” 


328  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

to  be  added,  is  no  mean  task.  It  is,  on  the  contrary, 
essential.  It  is  essential  to  sweep  away  in  art  all  that 
is  ultimately  found  to  be  fundamentally  ugly,  whether 
by  being,  at  the  one  end,  distastefully  pretty,  or,  at 
the  other,  hopelessly  crude.  For  ugliness  produces 
nausea  of  the  stomach  and  sets  the  teeth  on  edge.  It 
does  so  literally,  not  metaphorically.  Ugliness,  since  it 
interferes  with  digestion,  since  it  disturbs  the  nervous 
system,  impairs  the  forces  of  life.  For  when  we  are 
talking  aesthetics  (as  the  word  itself  indicates)  we  are 
ultimately  talking  physiologically.  Even  our  meta¬ 
physics  —  if  it  is  to  have  any  meaning  for  us  —  must 
have  a  physical  side.  Unless  we  hold  that  fact  in 
mind,  we  shall  talk  astray  and  are  likely  to  say  little 
that  is  to  the  point. 

Art  has  to  be  seen  as  beauty  and  it  is  the  function  of 
aesthetics  so  to  see  it.  How  slowly  and  painfully  the 
function  works  every  one  must  know  by  observing  the 
aesthetic  judgments  of  other  people,  if  not  by  recalling 
his  own  experiences.  I  know  in  my  own  experience 
how  hardly  and  subconsciously  this  process  works.  In 
the  matter  of  pictures,  for  instance,  I  have  found 
throughout  life,  from  Rubens  in  adolescence  to  Ce¬ 
zanne  in  recent  years,  that  a  revelation  of  the  beauty 
of  a  painter’s  work  which,  on  the  surface,  is  alien  or 
repulsive  to  one’s  sensibility,  came  only  after  years  of 
contemplation,  and  then  most  often  by  a  sudden  rev¬ 
elation,  in  a  flash,  by  a  direct  intuition  of  the  beauty 
of  some  particular  picture  which  henceforth  became 


CONCLUSION 


329 


the  clue  to  all  the  painter’s  work.  It  is  a  process  com¬ 
parable  to  that  which  is  in  religion  termed  “  conver¬ 
sion,”  and,  indeed,  of  like  nature.1  So  also  it  is  in 
literature.  And  in  life?  We  are  accustomed  to  suppose 
that  a  moral  action  is  much  easier  to  judge  than  a 
picture  of  Cezanne.  We  do  not  dream  of  bringing  the 
same  patient  and  attentive,  as  it  were  aesthetic,  spirit 
to  life  as  we  bring  to  painting.  Perhaps  we  are  right, 
considering  what  poor  bungling  artists  most  of  us  are 
in  living.  For  “art  is  easy,  life  is  difficult,”  as  Liszt 
used  to  say.  The  reason,  of  course,  is  that  the  art  of 
living  differs  from  the  external  arts  in  that  we  cannot 
exclude  the  introduction  of  alien  elements  into  its 
texture.  Our  art  of  living,  when  we  achieve  it,  is  of  so 
high  and  fine  a  quality  precisely  because  it  so  largely 
lies  in  harmoniously  weaving  into  the  texture  elements 
that  we  have  not  ourselves  chosen,  or  that,  having 
chosen,  we  cannot  throw  aside.  Yet  it  is  the  attitude 
of  the  spectators  that  helps  to  perpetuate  that  bun- 
gling. 

It  is  Plotinus  whom  we  may  fairly  regard  as  the 
founder  of  ^Esthetics  in  the  philosophic  sense,  and  it 
was  as  formulated  by  Plotinus,  though  this  we  some¬ 
times  fail  to  recognise,  that  the  Greek  attitude  in  these 
matters,  however  sometimes  modified,  has  come  down 

1  Schopenhauer  long  ago  pointed  out  that  a  picture  should  be  looked 
at  as  a  royal  personage  is  approached,  in  silence,  until  the  moment  it 
pleases  to  speak  to  you,  for,  if  you  speak  first  (and  how  many  critics  one 
knows  who  “speak  first”!),  you  expose  yourself  to  hear  nothing  but  the 
sound  of  your  own  voice.  In  other  words,  it  is  a  spontaneous  and 
“mystical”  experience. 


330 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


to  us.1  We  may  be  forgiven  for  not  always  recognising 
it,  because  it  is  rather  strange  that  it  should  be  so.  It 
is  strange,  that  is  to  say,  that  the  aesthetic  attitude, 
which  we  regard  as  so  emphatically  Greek,  should 
have  been  left  for  formulation  until  the  Greek  world 
had  passed  away,  that  it  should  not  have  been  Plato, 
but  an  Alexandrian,  living  in  Rome  seven  centuries 
after  him,  who  set  forth  what  seems  to  us  a  distinc¬ 
tively  Platonic  view  of  life.2  The  Greeks,  indeed,  seem 
to  have  recognised,  apart  from  the  lower  merely 
“ethical”  virtues  of  habit  and  custom,  the  higher 
“intellectual”  virtues  which  were  deliberately  planned, 
and  so  of  the  nature  of  art.  But  Plotinus  definitely 
recognised  the  aesthetic  contemplation  of  Beauty,  to¬ 
gether  with  the  One  and  the  Good,  as  three  aspects 
of  the  Absolute.3  He  thus  at  once  placed  aesthetics 
on  the  highest  possible  pedestal,  beside  religion  and 

1  It  is  through  Plotinus,  also,  that  we  realise  how  aesthetics  is  on  the 
same  plane,  if  not  one,  with  mysticism.  For  by  his  insistence  on  Con¬ 
templation,  which  is  aesthetics,  we  learn  to  understand  what  is  meant 
when  it  is  said,  as  it  often  is,  that  mysticism  is  Contemplation.  (On 
this  point,  and  on  the  early  evolutions  of  Christian  Mysticism,  see  Dom 
Cuthbert  Butler,  Western  Mysticism  (1922). 

2  Really,  however,  Plotinus  was  here  a  Neo-Aristotelian  rather  than  a 
Neo-Platonist,  for  Aristotle  ( Ethics ,  book  x,  chap.  6)  had  put  the  claim 
of  the  Contemplative  life  higher  even  than  Plato  and  almost  forestalled 
Plotinus.  But  as  Aristotle  was  himself  here  a  Platonist  that  does  not 
much  matter. 

*  See  Inge,  Philosophy  of  Plotinus ,  p.  179.  In  a  fine  passage  (quoted  by 
Bridges  in  his  Spirit  of  Man )  Plotinus  represents  contemplation  as  the 
great  function  of  Nature  herself,  content,  in  a  sort  of  self-consciousness, 
to  do  nothing  more  than  perfect  that  fair  and  bright  vision.  This  “meta¬ 
physical  Narcissism,”  as  Palante  might  call  it,  accords  with  the  concept 
don  of  various  later  thinkers,  like  Schopenhauer,  and  like  Gaultier,  who, 
however,  seldom  n;fers  to  Plotinu3. 


CONCLUSION 


33* 


morals;  he  placed  it  above  art,  or  as  comprehending 
art,  for  he  insisted  that  Contemplation  is  an  active 
quality,  so  that  all  human  creative  energy  may  be 
regarded  as  the  by-play  of  contemplation.  That  was 
to  carry  rather  far  the  function  of  aesthetic  contempla¬ 
tion.  But  it  served  to  stamp  for  ever,  on  the  minds  of 
all  sensitive  to  that  stamp  who  came  after,  the  definite 
realisation  of  the  sublimest,  the  most  nearly  divine,  of 
human  aptitudes.  Every  great  spirit  has  furnished  the 
measure  of  his  greatness  by  the  more  or  less  complete¬ 
ness  in  which  at  the  ultimate  outpost  of  his  vision  over 
the  world  he  has  attained  to  that  active  contemplation 
of  life  as  a  spectacle  which  Shakespeare  finally  em¬ 
bodied  in  the  figure  of  Prospero. 

It  may  be  interesting  to  note  in  passing  that,  psy¬ 
chologically  considered,  all  aesthetic  enjoyment  among 
the  ordinary  population,  neither  artists  in  the  narrow 
sense  nor  philosophers,  still  necessarily  partakes  to 
some  degree  of  genuine  aesthetic  contemplation,  and 
that  such  contemplation  seems  to  fall  roughly  into  two 
classes,  to  one  or  other  of  which  every  one  who  experi¬ 
ences  aesthetic  enjoyment  belongs.  These  have,  I 
believe,  been  defined  by  Miiller-Freienfels  as  that  of 
the  “Zuschauer,”  who  feels  that  he  is  looking  on,  and 
that  of  the  “  Mitspieler,”  who  feels  that  he  is  joining 
in;  on  the  one  side,  we  may  say,  he  who  knows  he  is 
looking  on,  the  spectator ,  and  on  the  other  he  who 
imaginatively  joins  in,  the  participator.  The  people  of 
the  first  group  are  those,  it  may  be,  in  whom  the 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


332 

sensory  nervous  apparatus  is  highly  developed  and 
they  are  able  to  adopt  the  most  typical  and  complete 
aesthetic  attitude ;  the  people  of  the  other  group  would 
seem  to  be  most  developed  on  the  motor  nervous  side 
and  they  are  those  who  themselves  desire  to  be  artists. 
Groos,  who  has  developed  the  aesthetic  side  of  “miter- 
leben,”  is  of  this  temperament,  and  he  had  at  first  sup¬ 
posed  that  every  one  was  like  him  in  this  respect.1 
Plotinus,  who  held  that  contemplation  embraced  ac¬ 
tivity,  must  surely  have  been  of  this  temperament 
Coleridge  was  emphatically  of  the  other  temperament, 
spectator  hand  particeps ,  as  he  himself  said.  But,  at  all 
events  in  northern  countries,  that  is  probably  not  the 
more  common  temperament.  The  aesthetic  attitude  of 
the  crowds  who  go  to  watch  football  matches  is  prob¬ 
ably  much  more  that  of  the  imaginative  participator 
than  of  the  pure  spectator. 

There  is  no  occasion  here  to  trace  the  history  of 
aesthetic  contemplation.  Yet  it  may  be  worth  while  to 
note  that  it  was  clearly  present  to  the  mind  of  the  fine 
thinker  and  great  moralist  who  brought  the  old  Greek 
idea  back  into  the  modern  world.  In  the  “  Philosophi¬ 
cal!  Regimen”  (as  it  has  been  named)  brought  to  light 
a  few  years  ago,  in  which  Shaftesbury  set  down  his 
self-communings,  we  find  him  writing  in  one  place: 
“  In  the  morning  am  I  to  see  anew?  Am  I  to  be  present 
yet  longer  and  content?  I  am  not  weary,  nor  ever  can 

1  R.  Schmidt,  Deutsche  Philosophic  der  Gegenwart  in  Selkstdarstellungen 
(1921),  vol,  11. 


CONCLUSION 


333 

be,  of  such  a  spectacle,  such  a  theatre,  such  a  presence, 
nor  at  acting  whatever  part  such  a  master  assigns  me. 
Be  it  ever  so  long,  I  stay  and  am  willing  to  see  on 
whilst  my  sight  continues  sound;  whilst  I  can  be  a 
spectator,  such  as  I  ought  to  be;  whilst  I  can  see 
reverently,  justly,  with  understanding  and  applause. 
And  when  I  see  no  more,  I  retire,  not  disdainfully,  but 
in  reverence  to  the  spectacle  and  master,  giving 
thanks.  .  .  .  Away,  man !  rise,  wipe  thy  mouth,  throw 
up  thy  napkin  and  have  done.  A  bellyful  (they  say)  is 
as  good  as  a  feast.” 

That  may  seem  but  a  simple  and  homely  way  of 
stating  the  matter,  though  a  few  years  later,  in  1727,  a 
yet  greater  spirit  than  Shaftesbury,  Swift,  combining 
the  conception  of  life  as  aesthetic  contemplation  with 
that  of  life  as  art,  wrote  in  a  letter,  “Life  is  a  tragedy, 
wherein  we  sit  as  spectators  awhile,  and  then  act  our 
own  part  in  it.”  If  we  desire  a  more  systematically 
philosophical  statement  we  may  turn  to  the  distin¬ 
guished  thinker  of  to-day  who  in  many  volumes  has 
most  powerfully  presented  the  same  essential  concep¬ 
tion,  with  all  its  implications,  of  life  as  a  spectacle. 
“Tirez  le  rideau;  la  farce  est  jou£e.”  That  Shake¬ 
spearian  utterance,  which  used  to  be  attributed  to 
Rabelais  on  his  death-bed,  and  Swift’s  comment  on 
life,  and  Shaftesbury’s  intimate  meditation,  would 
seem  to  be  —  on  the  philosophic  and  apart  from  the 
moral  side  of  life  —  entirely  in  the  spirit  that  Jules  de 
Gaultier  has  so  elaborately  developed.  The  world  is 


334 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


a  spectacle,  and  all  the  men  and  women  the  actors  on 
its  stage.  Enjoy  the  spectacle  while  you  will,  whether 
comedy  or  tragedy,  enter  into  the  spirit  of  its  manifold 
richness  and  beauty,  yet  take  it  not  too  seriously,  even 
wThen  you  leave  it  and  the  curtains  are  drawn  that 
conceal  it  for  ever  from  your  eyes,  growrn  weary  at  last. 

Such  a  conception,  indeed,  was  already  to  be  seen  in 
u  deliberately  philosophical  form  in  Schopenhauer 
(who,  no  doubt,  influenced  Gaultier)  and,  later, 
Nietzsche,  especially  the  early  Nietzsche,  although  he 
never  entirely  abandoned  it;  his  break  with  Wagner, 
however,  whom  he  had  regarded  as  the  typical  artist, 
ted  him  to  become  suddenly  rather  critical  of  art  and 
artists,  as  we  see  in  “  Human-all-too-Human,”  which 
immediately  followed  “Wagner  in  Bayreuth,”  and  he 
became  inclined  to  look  on  the  artist,  in  the  narrow 
sense,  as  only  “a  splendid  relic  of  the  past,”  not, 
indeed,  altogether  losing  his  earlier  conception,  but 
disposed  to  believe  that  “the  scientific  man  is  the 
finest  development  of  the  artistic  man.”  In  his  essay 
on  Wagner  he  had  presented  art  as  the  essentially 
metaphysical  activity  of  Man,  here  following  Schopen¬ 
hauer.  “Every  genius,”  well  said  Schopenhauer,  “is 
a  great  child;  he  gazes  out  at  the  world  as  something 
strange,  a  spectacle,  and  therefore  with  purely  ob¬ 
jective  interest.”  That  is  to  say  that  the  highest  atti¬ 
tude  attainable  by  man  towards  life  is  that  of  aesthetic 
contemplation.  But  it  took  on  a  different  character  in 
Nietzsche.  In  1878  Nietzsche  wrote  of  his  early  essay 


CONCLUSION 


335 

on  Wagner:  “At  that  time  I  believed  that  the  world 
was  created  from  the  aesthetic  standpoint,  as  a  play, 
and  that  as  a  moral  phenomenon  it  was  a  deception: 
on  that  account  I  came  to  the  conclusion  that  the 
world  was  only  to  be  justified  as  an  aesthetic  phenome¬ 
non.”  1  At  the  end  of  his  active  career  Nietzsche  was 
once  more  reproducing  this  proposition  in  many  ways. 
Jules  de  Gaultier  has  much  interested  himself  in 
Nietzsche,  but  he  had  already  reached,  no  doubt 
through  Schopenhauer,  a  rather  similar  conception 
before  he  came  in  contact  with  Nietzsche’s  work,  and 
in  the  present  day  he  is  certainly  the  thinker  who  has 
most  systematically  and  philosophically  elaborated  the 
conception.2 

Gaultier  is  most  generally  known  by  that  perhaps 
not  quite  happily  chosen  term  of  “Bovarism,”  em¬ 
bodied  in  the  title  of  his  earliest  book  and  abstracted 
from  Flaubert’s  heroine,  which  stands  for  one  of  his 
most  characteristic  conceptions,  and,  indeed,  in  a  large 
sense,  for  the  central  idea  of  his  philosophy.  In  its 
primary  psychological  sense  Bovarism  is  the  tendency 
—  the  unconscious  tendency  of  Emma  Bovary  and, 
more  or  less,  all  of  us  —  to  conceive  of  ourselves  as 
other  than  we  are.  Our  picture  of  the  world,  for  good 
or  for  evil,  is  an  idealised  picture,  a  fiction,  a  waking 

1  E.  Fbrster-Nietzsche,  Das  Leben  Nietzsches ,  vol.  II,  p.  99. 

*  W.  M.  Salter  in  his  Nietzsche  the  Thinker  —  probably  the  best  and 
most  exact  study  of  Nietzsche’s  thought  we  possess  —  summarises 
Nietzsche’s  “aesthetic  metaphysics,’  as  he  terms  it  (pp.  46-48),  in  words 
which  apply  almost  exactly  to  Gaultier. 


336 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


dream,  an  als  ob,  as  Vaihinger  would  say.  But  when 
we  idealise  the  world  we  begin  by  first  idealising  our¬ 
selves.  We  imagine  ourselves  other  than  we  are,  and 
in  so  imagining,  as  Gaultier  clearly  realises,  we  tend  to 
mould  ourselves,  so  that  reality  becomes  a  prolonga¬ 
tion  of  fiction.  As  Meister  Eckhart  long  since  finely 
said: 11 A  man  is  what  he  loves.”  A  similar  thought  was 
in  Plato’s  mind.  In  modern  times  a  variation  of  this 
same  idea  has  been  worked  out,  not  as  by  Gaultier 
from  the  philosophic  side,  but  from  the  medical  and 
more  especially  the  psycho-analytic  side,  by  Dr.  Al¬ 
fred  Adler  of  Vienna.1  Adler  has  suggestively  shown 
how  often  a  man’s  or  a  woman’s  character  is  consti¬ 
tuted  by  a  process  of  fiction,  —  that  is  by  making  an 
ideal  of  what  it  is,  or  what  it  ought  to  be,  —  and  then 
so  far  as  possible  moulding  it  into  the  shape  of  that 
fiction,  a  process  which  is  often  interwoven  with 
morbid  elements,  especially  with  an  original  basis  of 
organic  defect,  the  reaction  being  an  effort,  sometimes 
successful,  to  overcome  that  defect,  and  even  to  trans¬ 
form  it  into  a  conspicuous  quality,  as  when  Demos¬ 
thenes,  who  was  a  stutterer,  made  himself  a  great 
orator.  Even  thinkers  may  not  wholly  escape  this 
tendency,  and  I  think  it  would  be  easily  possible  to 
show  that,  for  instance,  Nietzsche  was  moved  by  what 
Adler  calls  the  “masculine  protest”;  one  remembers 
how  shrmkingly  delicate  Nietzsche  was  towards  women 

1  See  especially  hi.#  book  Ub-ar  den  Nervosen  Ctiarakter  (1913).  It  ha# 

been  translated  into  English. 


CONCLUSION 


337 

and  how  emphatically  he  declared  they  should  never 
be  approached  without  a  whip.  Adler  owed  nothing  to 
Gaultier,  of  whom  he  seems  to  be  ignorant;  he  found 
his  first  inspiration  in  Vaihinger’s  doctrine  of  the  “as 
if”;  Gaultier,  however,  owes  nothing  to  Vaihinger, 
and,  indeed,  began  to  publish  earlier,  though  not 
before  Vaihinger’s  book  was  written.  Gaultier’s  philo¬ 
sophic  descent  is  mainly  from  Spinoza,  Berkeley, 
Hume,  Schopenhauer,  and  Nietzsche. 

There  is  another  deeper  and  wider  sense,  a  more 
abstract  esoteric  sense,  in  which  Jules  de  Gaultier 
understands  Bovarism.  It  is  not  only  the  human  being 
and  human  groups  who  are  psychologically  Bovaristic, 
the  Universe  itself,  the  Eternal  Being  (to  adopt  an 
accepted  fiction),  metaphysically  partakes  of  Bovar¬ 
ism.  The  Universe,  it  seems  to  Gaultier,  necessarily 
conceives  itself  as  other  than  it  is.  Single,  it  conceives 
itself  multiple,  as  subject  and  object.  Thus  is  fur¬ 
nished  the  fundamental  convention  which  we  must 
grant  to  the  Dramatist  who  presents  the  cosmic  tragi¬ 
comedy.1 

It  may  seem  to  some  that  the  vision  of  the  world 
which  Man  pursues  on  his  course  across  the  Universe 
becomes  ever  more  impalpable  and  visionary.  And  so 
perhaps  it  may  be.  But  even  if  that  were  an  undesir¬ 
able  result,  it  would  still  be  useless  to  fight  against 
God.  We  are,  after  all,  merely  moulding  the  concep- 

1  Jules  de  Gaultier,  Le  B ovary sme,  and  various  other  of  his  works. 
Georges  Palante  has  lucidly  and  concisely  expounded  the  idea  of  Bovar¬ 
ism  in  a  small  volume,  La  Philosophie  du  Bovary  sme  ( Mercure  de  France ). 


33$ 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


tions  which  a  little  later  will  become  commonplace 
&nd  truisms.  For  really  —  while  we  must  hold  physics 
and  metaphysics  apart,  for  they  cannot  be  blended  — 
a  metaphysics  which  is  out  of  harmony  with  physics 
is  negligible;  it  is  nothing  in  the  world.  And  it  is  our 
physical  world  that  is  becoming  more  impalpable  and 
visionary.  It  is  “matter,”  the  very  structure  of  the 
“atom,”  that  is  melting  into  a  dream,  and  if  it  may 
seem  that  on  the  spiritual  side  life  tends  to  be  mould¬ 
ing  itself  to  the  conception  of  Calderon  as  a  dream,  it 
is  because  the  physical  atom  is  pursuing  that  course. 
Unless  we  hold  in  mind  the  analysis  of  the  world 
towards  which  the  physicist  is  bringing  us,  we  shall  not 
understand  the  synthesis  of  the  world  towards  which 
the  philosopher  is  bringing  us.  Gaultier’s  philosophy 
may  not  be  based  upon  physics,  but  it  seems  to  be  in 
harmony  with  physics. 

This  is  the  metaphysical  scaffolding  —  we  may  if  we 
like  choose  to  dispense  with  it  —  by  aid  of  which  Jules 
de  Gaultier  erects  his  spectacular  conception  of  th® 
world.  He  is  by  no  means  concerned  to  deny  the 
necessity  of  morality.  On  the  contrary,  morality  is  the 
necessary  restraint  on  the  necessary  biological  instinct 
of  possession,  on  the  desire,  that  is,  by  the  acquisition 
of  certain  objects,  to  satisfy  passions  which  are  most 
often  only  the  exaggeration  of  natural  needs,  but  which 
—  through  the  power  of  imagination  such  exaggera¬ 
tion  inaugurates  in  the  world  —  lead  to  the  develop¬ 
ment  of  civilisation.  Limited  and  definite  so  long  as 


CONCLUSION 


confined  to  their  biological  ends,  needs  are  indefinitely 
elastic,  exhibiting,  indeed,  an  almost  hysterical  char¬ 
acter  which  becomes  insatiable.  They  mark  a  hyper¬ 
trophy  of  the  possessive  instinct  which  experience 
shows  to  be  a  menace  to  social  life.  Thus  the  Great 
War  of  recent  times  may  be  regarded  as  the  final  tragic 
result  of  the  excessive  development  through  half  a 
century  of  an  economic  fever,  the  activity  of  needs 
beyond  their  due  biological  ends  producing  suddenly 
the  inevitable  result.1  So  that  the  possessive  instinct, 
while  it  is  the  cause  of  the  formation  of  an  economic 
civilised  society,  when  pushed  too  far  becomes  the 
cause  of  the  ruin  of  that  society.  Man,  who  begins  by 
acquiring  just  enough  force  to  compel  Nature  to  supply 
his  bare  needs,  himself  becomes,  according  to  the 
tragic  Greek  saying,  the  greatest  force  of  Nature.  Yet 
the  fact  that  a  civilisation  may  persist  for  centuries 
shows  that  men  in  societies  have  found  methods  of 
combating  the  exaggerated  development  of  the  pos¬ 
sessive  instinct,  of  retaining  it  within  bounds  which 
have  enabled  societies  to  enjoy  a  fairly  long  life. 
These  methods  become  embodied  in  religions  and 
moralities  and  laws.  They  react  in  concert  to  restrain 
the  greediness  engendered  by  the  possessive  instinct. 
They  make  virtues  of  Temperance  and  Sobriety  and 
Abnegation.  They  invent  Great  Images  which  arouse 
human  hopes  and  human  fears.  They  prescribe  im- 

1  Gaultier  has  luminously  discussed  the  relations  of  War,  Civilisation* 
and  Art  in  the  Monde  Nouveau,  August,  1920.  and  February,  1921. 


340 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


peratives,  with  sanctions,  in  part  imposed  by  the 
Great  Images  and  in  part  by  the  actual  executive  force 
of  social  law.  So  societies  are  enabled  to  immunise 
themselves  against  the  ravaging  auto-intoxication  of 
an  excessive  instinct  of  possession,  and  the  services 
rendered  by  religions  and  moralities  cannot  be  too 
highly  estimated.  They  are  the  spontaneous  physi¬ 
ological  processes  which  counteract  disease  before 
medical  science  comes  into  play. 

But  are  they  of  any  use  in  those  periods  of  advanced 
civilisation  which  they  have  themselves  contributed  to 
form?  When  Man  has  replaced  flint  knives  and  clubs 
and  slings  by  the  elaborate  weapons  we  know,  can  he 
be  content  with  methods  of  social  preservation  which 
date  from  the  time  of  flint  knives  and  clubs  and  slings? 
The  efficacy  of  those  restraints  depends  on  a  sensibility 
which  could  only  exist  when  men  scarcely  distinguished 
imaginations  from  perceptions.  Thence  arose  the  cre¬ 
dulity  on  which  religions  and  moralities  flourished. 
But  now  the  Images  have  grown  pale  in  human 
sensibility,  just  as  they  have  in  words,  which  are  but 
effaced  images.  We  need  a  deeper  reality  to  take  the 
place  of  these  early  beliefs  which  the  growth  of  intelli¬ 
gence  necessarily  shows  to  be  illusory.  We  must  seek 
in  the  human  ego  an  instinct  in  which  is  manifested  a 
truly  autonomous  play  of  the  power  of  imagination,  an 
instinct  which  by  virtue  of  its  own  proper  development 
may  restrain  the  excesses  of  the  possessive  instinct 
and  dissipate  the  perils  which  threaten  civilisation. 


CONCLUSION 


34i 

The  aesthetic  instinct  alone  answers  to  that  double 
demand. 

At  this  point  we  may  pause  to  refer  to  the  interesting 
analogy  between  this  argument  of  Jules  de  Gaultier 
and  another  recently  proposed  solution  of  the  prob¬ 
lems  of  civilisation  presented  by  Bertrand  Russell,  to 
which  there  has  already  been  occasion  to  refer.  The 
two  views  were  clearly  suggested  by  the  same  events, 
though  apparently  in  complete  independence,  and  it 
is  interesting  to  observe  the  considerable  degree  of 
harmony  which  unites  two  such  distinguished  thinkers 
in  different  lands,  and  with  unlike  philosophic  stand¬ 
points  as  regards  ultimate  realities.1  Man’s  impulses, 
as  we  know,  Bertrand  Russell  holds  to  be  of  two  kinds: 
those  that  are  possessive  and  those  that  are  creative; 
the  typical  possessive  impulse  being  that  of  property 
and  the  typical  creative  impulse  that  of  the  artist.  It 
is  in  following  the  creative  impulse,  he  believes,  that 
man’s  path  of  salvation  lies,  for  the  possessive  im¬ 
pulses  necessarily  lead  to  conflict  while  the  creative 

1  These  are  problems  concerning  which  innocent  people  might  imagine 
that  the  wise  refrained  from  speculating,  but,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the 
various  groups  of  philosophic  devotees  may  be  divided  into  those  termed 
“  Idealists”  and  those  termed  “  Realists,”  each  assured  of  the  superiority 
of  his  own  way  of  viewing  thought.  Roughly  speaking,  for  the  idealist 
thought  means  the  creation  of  the  world,  for  the  realist  its  discovery. 
But  here  (as  in  many  differences  between  Tweedledum  and  Tweedledee 
for  which  men  have  slain  one  another  these  thousands  of  years)  there 
seem  to  be  superiorities  on  both  sides.  Each  looks  at  thought  in  a  differ¬ 
ent  aspect.  But  the  idealist  could  hardly  create  the  world  with  nothing 
there  to  make  it  from,  nor  the  realist  discover  it  save  through  creating  it 
afresh.  We  cannot,  so  to  put  it,  express  in  a  single  formula  of  three  di* 
mensions  what  only  exists  as  a  unity  in  four  dimensions. 


342 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


impulses  are  essentially  harmonious.  Bertrand  Russell 
seeks  the  unification  of  life.  But  consistency  of  action 
should,  he  holds,  spring  from  consistency  of  impulse 
rather  than  from  the  control  of  impulse  by  will.  Like 
Gaultier,  he  believes  in  what  has  been  called,  perhaps 
not  happily,  4 4 the  law  of  irony”;  that  is  to  say,  that 
the  mark  we  hit  is  never  the  mark  we  aimed  at,  so 
that,  in  all  supreme  success  in  life,  as  Goethe  said  of 
Wilhelm  Meister,  we  are  like  Saul,  the  son  of  Kish, 
who  went  forth  to  seek  his  father’s  asses  and  found  a 
kingdom.  44 Those  who  best  promote  life,”  Russell 
prefers  to  put  it,  4  4  do  not  have  life  for  their  purpose. 
They  aim  rather  at  what  seems  like  a  gradual  incarna¬ 
tion,  a  bringing  into  our  human  existence  of  something 
eternal.”  And,  again  like  Gaultier,  he  invokes  Spinoza 
and  what  in  his  phraseology  he  called  ‘‘the  intellectual 
love  of  God.”  “Take  no  thought,  saying,  What  shall 
we  eat?  or,  What  shall  we  drink?  or,  Wherewithal  shall 
we  be  clothed?  Whosoever  has  known  a  strong  crea¬ 
tive  impulse  has  known  the  value  of  this  precept  in  its 
exact  and  literal  sense;  it  is  preoccupation  with  posses¬ 
sion,  more  than  anything  else,  that  prevents  men  from 
living  freely  and  nobly.”  1 

This  view  of  the  matter  seems  substantially  the 
same,  it  may  be  in  an  unduly  simplified  form,  as  the 
conception  which  Jules  de  Gaultier  has  worked  out 
more  subtly  and  complexly,  seeking  to  weave  in  a 
large  number  of  the  essential  factors,  realising  that  the 

‘  1  Bertrand  Russell,  Principles  of  Social  Reconstruction  (*gi6),  p.  235, 


CONCLUSION 


343 


harmony  of  life  must  yet  be  based  on  an  underlying 
conflict.2  The  main  difference  would  seem  to  be  that 
Bertrand  Russell's  creative  impulse  seems  to  be  fairly 
identical  with  the  productive  impulse  of  art  in  the 
large  sense  in  which  I  have  throughout  understood  it, 
while  Jules  de  Gaultier  is  essentially  concerned  with 
the  philosophic  or  religious  side  of  the  art  impulse ;  that 
is  to  say,  the  attitude  of  aesthetic  contemplation  which 
in  appearance  forms  the  absolute  antithesis  to  the 
possessive  instinct.  It  is  probable,  however,  that  there 
is  no  real  discrepancy  here,  for  as  we  may  regard 
aesthetic  contemplation  as  the  passive  aspect  of  art, 
so  art  may  be  regarded  as  the  active  aspect  of  aes¬ 
thetic  contemplation,  and  Bertrand  Russell,  we  may 
certainly  believe,  would  include  the  one  under  art 
as  Jules  de  Gaultier  would  include  the  other  under 
aesthetics. 

The  aesthetic  instinct,  as  Jules  de  Gaultier  under¬ 
stands  it,  answers  the  double  demand  of  our  needs 
to-day,  not,  like  religions  and  moralities,  by  evoking 
images  as  menaces  or  as  promises,  only  effective  if  they 
can  be  realised  in  the  world  of  sensation,  and  so  merely 
constituting  another  attempt  to  gratify  the  possessive 
instinct,  by  enslaving  the  power  of  imagination  to  that 
alien  master.  Through  the  aesthetic  instinct  Man  is 
enabled  to  procure  joy,  not  from  the  things  them¬ 
selves  and  the  sensations  due  to  the  possession  of 


1  I  may  here  be  allowed  to  refer  to  another  discussion  of  this  point, 
Havelock  Ellis,  The  Philosophy  of  Conflict ,  and  Other  Essays,  pp.  57-68. 


344 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


things,  but  from  the  very  images  of  things.  Beyond 
the  sense  of  utility  bound  up  with  the  possession  of 
objects,  he  acquires  the  privilege,  bound  up  with  the 
sole  contemplation  of  them,  of  enjoying  the  beauty  of 
things.  By  the  aesthetic  instinct  the  power  of  imagina¬ 
tion  realises  its  own  proper  tendency  and  attains  its 
own  proper  end. 

Such  a  process  cannot  fail  to  have  its  reaction  on  the 
social  environment.  It  must  counteract  the  exaggera¬ 
tion  of  the  possessive  instinct.  To  that  impulse,  when  it 
transgresses  the  legitimate  bounds  of  biological  needs 
and  threatens  to  grow  like  a  destructive  cancer,  the 
aesthetic  instinct  proposes  another  end,  a  more  human 
end,  that  of  aesthetic  joy.  Therewith  the  exuberance  of 
insatiable  and  ruinous  cupidity  is  caught  in  the  forms 
of  art,  the  beauty  of  the  universe  is  manifested  to  all 
eyes,  and  the  happiness  which  had  been  sought  in  the 
paradoxical  enterprise  of  glutting  that  insatiable  desire 
finds  its  perpetual  satisfaction  in  the  absolute  and 
complete  realisation  of  beauty. 

As  Jules  de  Gaultier  understands  it,  we  see  that  the 
aesthetic  instinct  is  linked  on  to  the  possessive  instinct. 
Bertrand  Russell  would  sometimes  seem  to  leave  the 
possessive  instinct  in  the  void  without  making  any 
provision  for  its  satisfaction.  In  Gaultier’s  view,  we 
may  probably  say  it  is  taken  in  charge  by  the  aesthetic 
instinct  as  soon  as  it  has  fulfilled  its  legitimate  biologi¬ 
cal  ends,  and  its  excessive  developments,  what  might 
otherwise  be  destructive,  are  sublimated.  The  aes- 


CONCLUSION 


345 

thetic  instinct,  Gaultier  insists,  like  the  other  instincts, 
even  the  possessive  instinct,  has  imperative  claims;  it 
is  an  appetite  of  the  ego,  developed  at  the  same  hearth 
of  intimate  activity,  drawing  its  strength  from  the 
same  superabundance  from  which  they  draw  strength. 
Therefore,  in  the  measure  in  which  it  absorbs  force 
they  must  lose  force,  and  civilisation  gains. 

The  development  of  the  aesthetic  sense  is,  indeed, 
indispensable  if  civilisation  —  which  we  may,  perhaps, 
from  the  present  point  of  view,  regard  with  Gaultier  as 
the  embroidery  worked  by  imagination  on  the  stuff  of 
our  elementary  needs  —  is  to  pass  safely  through  its 
critical  period  and  attain  any  degree  of  persistence. 
The  appearance  of  the  aesthetic  sense  is  then  an  event 
of  the  first  order  in  the  rank  of  natural  miracles, 
strictly  comparable  to  the  evolution  in  the  organic 
sphere  of  the  optic  nerves,  which  made  it  possible  to 
know  things  clearly  apart  from  the  sensations  of  actual 
contact.  There  is  no  mere  simile  here,  Gaultier  be¬ 
lieves:  the  faculty  of  drawing  joy  from  the  images  of 
things,  apart  from  the  possession  of  them,  is  based  on 
physiological  conditions  which  growing  knowledge  of 
the  nervous  system  may  some  day  make  clearer.1 


1  I  may  remark  that  Plato  had  long  before  attributed  the  same  obser¬ 
vation  to  the  Pythagorean  Timaeus  in  the  sublime  and  amusing  dialogue 
that  goes  under  that  name:  “Sight  in  my  opinion  is  the  source  of  the 
greatest  benefit  to  us,  for  had  we  never  seen  the  stars,  and  the  sun,  and 
the  heavens,  none  of  the  words  which  we  have  spoken  about  the  universe 
would  ever  have  been  uttered.  But  now  the  sight  of  day  and  night,  and 
the  months  and  the  revolution  of  the  years,  have  created  Number,  and 
have  given  us  a  conception  of  Time,  and  the  powers  of  inquiring  about 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


346 

It  is  this  specific  quality,  the  power  of  enjoying 
things  without  being  reduced  to  the  need  of  possessing 
them,  which  differentiates  the  aesthetic  instinct  from 
other  instincts  and  confers  on  it  the  character  of 
morality.  Based,  like  the  other  instincts  on  egoism,  it, 
y&t,  unlike  the  other  instincts,  leads  to  no  destructive 
struggles.  Its  powers  of  giving  satisfaction  are  not 
dissipated  by  the  number  of  those  who  secure  that 
satisfaction.  /Esthetic  contemplation  engenders  nei¬ 
ther  hatred  nor  envy.  Unlike  the  things  that  appeal 
to  the  possessive  instinct,  it  brings  men  together  and 
increases  sympathy.  Unlike  those  moralities  which  are 
compelled  to  institute  prohibitions,  the  aesthetic  sense, 
even  in  the  egoistic  pursuit  of  its  own  ends,  becomes 
blended  with  morality,  and  so  serves  in  the  task  of 
maintaining  society. 

Thus  it  is  that,  by  aiming  at  a  different  end,  the 
aesthetic  sense  yet  attains  the  end  aimed  at  by  morality. 
That  is  the  aspect  of  the  matter  which  Gaultier  would 
emphasise.  There  is  implied  in  it  the  judgment  that 
when  the  aesthetic  sense  deviates  from  its  proper  ends 
to  burden  itself  with  moral  intentions  —  when,  that 
is,  it  ceases  to  be  itself  —  it  ceases  to  realise  morality. 
“  Art  for  art’s  sake  I "  the  artists  of  old  cried.  We  laugh 
at  that  cry  now.  Gaultier,  indeed,  considers  that  the 
idea  of  pure  art  has  in  every  age  been  a  red  rag  in  the 
eyes  of  the  human  bulk  Yet,  if  we  had  possessed  the 

the  Nature  of  the  Universe,  and  from  this  source  we  have  derived  phi¬ 
losophy,  than  which  no  greater  good  ever  was  or  will  be  given  by  the  godat 
to  mortal  maa.” 


CONCLUSION 


347 

necessary  intelligence,  we  might  have  seen  that  it  held 
a  great  moial  truth.  “The  poet,  retired  in  his  Tower 
of  Ivory,  isolated,  according  to  his  desire,  from  the 
world  of  man,  resembles,  whether  he  so  wishes  or 
not,  another  solitary  figure,  the  watcher  enclosed  for 
months  at  a  time  in  a  lighthouse  at  the  head  of  a  cliff. 
Far  from  the  towns  peopled  by  human  crowds,  far 
from  the  earth,  of  which  he  scarcely  distinguishes  the 
outlines  through  the  mist,  this  man  in  his  wild  solitude, 
forced  to  live  only  with  himself,  almost  forgets  the 
common  language  of  men,  but  he  knows  admirably 
well  how  to  formulate  through  the  darkness  another 
language  infinitely  useful  to  men  and  visible  afar  to 
seamen  in  distress.”  1  The  artist  for  art’s  sake  —  and 
the  same  is  constantly  found  true  of  the  .scientist  for 
science’s  sake  2  —  in  turning  aside  from  the  common 
utilitarian  aims  of  men  is  really  engaged  in  a  task  none 
other  can  perform,  of  immense  utility  to  men.  The 
Cistercians  of  old  hid  their  cloisters  in  forests  and 
wildernesses  afar  from  society,  mixing  not  with  men 
nor  performing  for  them  so-called  useful  tasks;  yet 
they  spent  their  days  and  nights  in  chant  and  prayer, 
working  for  the  salvation  of  the  world,  and  they  stand 
as  the  symbol  of  all  higher  types  of  artists,  not  the  less 

1  Jules  de  Gaultier,  “  La  Guerre  et  les  Destinies  de  rArt,”  Monde 
Nouveau ,  August,  1920. 

a  Thus  Einstein,  like  every  true  man  of  science,  holds  that  cultural 
developments  are  not  to  be  measured  in  terms  of  utilitarian  technical 
advances,  much  as  he  has  himself  been  concerned  with  such  advances, 
but  that,  like  the  devotee  of  “Art  for  Art’s  sake,”  the  man  of  science 
must  proclaim  the  maxim,  “Science  for  Science’s  sake.” 


348  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

so  because  they,  too,  illustrate  that  faith  transcending 
sight,  without  which  no  art  is  possible. 

The  artist,  as  Gaultier  would  probably  put  it,  has  to 
effect  a  necessary  Bovarism.  If  he  seeks  to  mix  him¬ 
self  up  with  the  passions  of  the  crowd,  if  his  work  shows 
the  desire  to  prove  anything,  he  thereby  neglects  the 
creation  of  beauty.  Necessarily  so,  for  he  excites  a 
state  of  combativity,  he  sets  up  moral,  political,  and 
social  values,  all  having  relation  to  biological  needs 
and  the  possessive  instinct,  the  most  violent  of  fer¬ 
ments.  He  is  entering  on  the  struggle  over  Truth  — • 
though  his  opinion  is  here  worth  no  more  than  any 
other  man’s  —  which,  on  account  of  the  presumption 
of  its  universality,  is  brandished  about  in  the  most 
ferociously  opposed  camps. 

The  mother  who  seeks  to  soothe  her  crying  child 
preaches  him  no  sermon.  She  holds  up  some  bright 
object  and  it  fixes  his  attention.  So  it  is  the  artist  acts: 
he  makes  us  see.  He  brings  the  world  before  us,  not  on 
the  plane  of  covetousness  and  fears  and  command¬ 
ments,  but  on  the  plane  of  representation;  the  world 
becomes  a  spectacle.  Instead  of  imitating  those  phi¬ 
losophers  who  with  analyses  and  syntheses  worry 
over  the  goal  of  life,  and  the  justification  of  the  world, 
and  the  meaning  of  the  strange  and  painful  phenome¬ 
non  called  Existence,  the  artist  takes  up  some  frag¬ 
ment  of  that  existence,  transfigures  it,  shows  it: 
There!  And  therewith  the  spectator  is  filled  with  en¬ 
thusiastic  joy,  and  the  transcendent  Adventure  of 


CONCLUSION 


349 

Existence  is  justified.  Every  great  artist,  a  Dante  or  a 
Shakespeare,  a  Dostoievsky  or  a  Proust,  thus  furnishes 
the  metaphysical  justification  of  existence  by  the 
beauty  of  the  vision  he  presents  of  the  cruelty  and  the 
horror  of  existence.  All  the  pain  and  the  madness,  even 
the  ugliness  and  the  commonplace  of  the  world,  he  con¬ 
verts  into  shining  jewels.  By  revealing  the  spectac¬ 
ular  character  of  reality  he  restores  the  serenity  of  its 
innocence.1  We  see  the  face  of  the  world  as  of  a  lovely 
woman  smiling  through  her  tears. 

How  are  we  to  expect  this  morality  —  if  so  we 
may  still  term  it  —  to  prevail?  Jules  de  Gaultier,  as 
we  have  seen,  realising  that  the  old  moralities  have 
melted  away,  seems  to  think  that  the  morality  of  art, 
by  virtue  of  its  life,  will  take  the  place  of  that  which  is 
dead.  But  he  is  not  specially  concerned  to  discuss  in 
detail  the  mechanism  of  this  replacement,  though  he 
looks  to  the  social  action  of  artists  in  initiation  and 
stimulation.  That  was  the  view  of  Guyau,  and  it  fitted 
in  with  his  sociological  conception  of  art  as  being  one 
with  life;  great  poets,  great  artists,  Guyau  believed, 
will  become  the  leaders  of  the  crowd,  the  priests  of  a 
social  religion  without  dogmas.2  But  Gaultier’s  con¬ 
ception  goes  beyond  this.  He  cannot  feel  that  the 
direct  action  of  poets  and  artists  is  sufficient.  They 

1  In  the  foregoing  paragraphs  I  have,  in  my  own  way,  reproduced  the 
thought,  occasionally  the  words,  of  Jules  de  Gaultier,  more  especially  in 
“La  Moralit6  Esthetique”  ( Mercure  de  France,  15th  December,  1921), 
probably  the  finest  short  statement  of  this  distinguished  thinker’s  re¬ 
flections  on  the  matter  in  question. 

*  Guyau,  L' Art  au  Point  de  Vue  Sociologique,  p.  163. 


350 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


only  reveal  the  more  conspicuous  aspects  of  the 
aesthetic  sense.  Gaultier  considers  that  the  aesthetic 
sense,  in  humbler  forms,  is  mixed  up  with  the  most 
primitive  manifestations  of  human  life,  wherein  it 
plays  a  part  of  unsuspected  importance.1  The  more 
thorough  investigation  of  these  primitive  forms,  he 
believes,  will  make  it  possible  for  the  lawmaker  to  aid 
the  mechanism  of  this  transformation  of  morality. 

Having  therewith  brought  us  to  the  threshold  of  the 
aesthetic  revolution,  Jules  de  Gaultier  departs.  It 
remains  necessary  to  point  out  that  it  is  only  the 
threshold.  However  intimately  the  elements  of  the 
aesthetic  sense  may  be  blended  with  primitive  human 
existence,  we  know  too  well  that,  as  the  conditions  of 
human  existence  are  modified,  art  seems  to  contract 
and  degenerate,  so  w'e  can  hardly  expect  the  aesthetic 
sense  to  develop  in  the  reverse  direction.  At  present, 


1  This  diffused  aesthetic  sense  is  correlated  with  a  diffused  artistic 
instinct,  based  on  craftsmanship,  which  the  Greeks  were  afraid  to  recog¬ 
nise  because  they  looked  down  with  contempt  on  the  handicrafts  as 
vulgar.  William  Morris  was  a  pioneer  in  asserting  this  association.  As 
a  distinguished  English  writer,  Mr.  Charles  Marriott,  the  novelist  and 
critic,  clearly  puts  the  modern  doctrine:  “The  first  step  is  to  absorb,  or 
re-absorb,  the  'Artist’  into  the  craftsman.  .  .  .  Once  agree  that  the  same 
aesthetic  considerations  which  apply  to  painting  a  picture  apply,  though 
in  a  different  degree,  to  painting  a  door,  and  you  have  emancipated 
labour  without  any  prejudice  to  the  highest  meaning  of  art.  ...  A  good 
surface  of  pai tit  on  a  door  is  as  truly  an  emotional  or  aesthetic  considera¬ 
tion  as  ‘significant  form,’  indeed  it  is  ‘significant  form.’”  ( Nation  and 
Athenaeum,  ist  July,  1922.)  Professor  Santayana  has  spoken  in  the  same 
sense:  “In  a  thoroughly  humanised  society  everything  —  clothes, 
speech,  manners,  government  —  is  a  work  of  art.”  {The  Dial,  June, 
1922,  p,  563.)  It  is,  indeed,  the  general  tendency  to-day  and  is  traceable 
Croce's  later  writings. 


CONCLUSION 


351 

in  the  existing  state  of  civilisation,  with  the  decay  of 
the  controlling  power  of  the  old  morality,  the  aesthetic 
sense  often  seems  to  be  also  decreasing,  rather  than 
increasing,  in  the  masses  of  the  population.1  One  need 
not  be  troubled  to  find  examples.  They  occur  on 
every  hand  and  whenever  we  take  up  a  newspaper. 
One  notes,  for  instance,  in  England,  that  the  most 
widespread  spectacularly  attractive  things  outside 
cities  may  be  said  to  be  the  private  parks  and  the 
churches.  (Cities  lie  outside  the  present  argument, 
for  their  inhabitants  are  carefully  watched  whenever 
they  approach  anything  that  appeals  to  the  possessive 
instinct.)  Formerly  the  parks  and  churches  were 
freely  open  all  day  long  for  those  who  desired  to  enjoy 
the  spectacle  of  their  beauty  and  not  to  possess  it. 
The  owners  of  parks  and  the  guardians  of  churches 
have  found  it  increasingly  necessary  to  close  them 
because  of  the  alarmingly  destructive  or  predatory 
impulses  of  a  section  of  the  public.  So  the  many  have 
to  suffer  for  the  sins  of  what  may  only  be  the  few.  It  io 
common  to  speak  of  this  as  a  recent  tendency  of  our 
so-called  civilisation.  But  the  excesses  of  the  posses¬ 
sive  instinct  cannot  have  been  entirely  latent  even  in 
remote  times,  though  they  seem  to  have  been  less  in 
evidence.  The  Platonic  Timseus  attributed  to  the 

1  Thus  it  has  often  been  pointed  out  that  the  Papuans  are  artists  in 
design  of  the  first  rank,  with  a  finer  taste  in  some  matters  than  the  most 
h‘*ghly  civilised  races  of  Europe.  Professor  R.  Semon,  who  has  some  re¬ 
marks  to  this  effect  ( Correspondenzblalt  of  the  German  Anthropological 
Society,  March,  1902),  adds  that  their  unfailing  artistic  sense  is  spread 
throughout  the  whole  population  and  shown  in  every  object  of  daily  use 


35* 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


spectacle  of  the  sun  and  the  moon  and  the  stars  the 
existence  of  philosophy.  Fie  failed  to  note  that  the  sun 
and  the  moon  and  the  stars  would  have  disappeared 
long  ago  ■ —  as  even  their  infinitely  more  numerous 
analogues  on  the  earth  beneath  are  likely  to  disappear 
—  had  they  happened  to  be  within  the  reach  of  preda¬ 
tory  human  hands.  But  the  warps  and  strains  of 
civilised  life,  with  its  excessive  industrialism  and 
militarism,  seem  to  disturb  the  wholesome  balance  of 
even  the  humblest  elements  of  the  possessive  and 
aesthetic  instincts.  This  means,  in  the  first  and  most 
important  place,  that  the  liberty  of  the  whole  com¬ 
munity  in  its  finest  manifestations  is  abridged  by  a 
handful  of  imbeciles.  There  are  infinite  freedoms 
which  it  would  be  a  joy  for  them  to  take,  and  a  help  to 
their  work,  and  a  benefit  to  the  world,  but  they  cannot 
be  allowed  to  take  them  because  there  are  some  who 
can  only  take  them  and  perish,  damning  others  with 
themselves.  Besides  this  supreme  injury  to  life,  there 
are  perpetual  minor  injuries  that  the  same  incapable 
section  of  people  are  responsible  for  in  every  direction, 
while  the  actual  cost  of  them  in  money,  to  the  com¬ 
munity  they  exert  so  pernicious  an  influence  on,  is  so 
great  and  so  increasing  that  it  constitutes  a  social 
and  individual  burden  which  from  time  to  time  leads 
to  outbursts  of  anxious  expostulation  never  steady 
enough  to  be  embodied  in  any  well-sustained  and 
coherent  policy. 

It  is  not,  indeed,  to  be  desired  that  the  eugenic 


CONCLUSION 


353 

action  of  society  should  be  directly  aimed  at  any  nar¬ 
rowly  aesthetic  or  moral  end.  That  has  never  been  the 
ideal  of  any  of  those  whose  conceptions  of  social  life 
deserve  to  be  taken  seriously,  least  of  all  Gal  ton,  who 
is  commonly  regarded  as  the  founder  of  the  modern 
scientific  art  of  eugenics.  “  Society  would  be  very  dull/' 
he  remarked,  “if  every  man  resembled  Marcus  Aure¬ 
lius  or  Adam  Bede.”  He  even  asserted  that  “we  must 
leave  morality  as  far  as  possible  out  of  the  discussion,” 
since  moral  goodness  and  badness  are  shifting  phases 
of  a  civilisation ;  what  is  held  morally  good  in  one  age 
is  held  bad  in  another.  That  would  hold  true  of  any 
aesthetic  revolution.  But  we  cannot  afford  to  do  with¬ 
out  the  sane  and  wholesome  persons  who  are  so  well 
balanced  that  they  can  adjust  themselves  to  the  condi¬ 
tions  of  every  civilisation  as  it  arises  and  carry  it  on  to 
its  finest  issues.  We  should  not,  indeed,  seek  to  breed 
them  directly,  and  we  need  not,  since  under  natural 
conditions  Nature  will  see  to  their  breeding.  But  it  is 
all  the  more  incumbent  upon  us  to  eliminate  those 
ill-balanced  and  poisonous  stocks  produced  by  the 
unnatural  conditions  which  society  in  the  past  had 
established.1  That  we  have  to  do  alike  in  the  interests 

1  The  presence  of  a  small  minority  of  abnormal  or  perverse  persons  — 
there  will  be  such,  we  may  be  sure,  in  every  possible  society  —  affords  no 
excuse  for  restricting  the  liberty  of  the  many  to  the  standard  of  the  few. 
The  general  prevalence  of  an  aesthetic  morality  in  classic  times  failed  to 
prevent  occasional  outbursts  of  morbid  sexual  impulse  in  the  presence  of 
objects  of  art,  even  in  temples.  We  find  records  of  Pygmalionism  and 
allied  perversities  in  Lucian,  Athenaeus,  Pliny,  Valerius  Maximus.  Yet 
supposing  that  the  Greeks  had  listened  to  the  proposals  of  some  strayed 
Puritan  visitor,  from  Britain  or  New  England,  to  abolish  nude  statues, 


354 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


of  the  offspring  of  these  diseased  stocks  and  in  the 
interests  of  society.  No  power  in  Heaven  or  Earth  can 
ever  confer  upon  us  the  right  to  create  the  unfit  in 
order  to  hang  them  like  millstones  around  the  necks  of 
the  fit.  The  genius  of  Galton  enabled  him  to  see  this 
clearly  afresh  and  to  indicate  the  reasonable  path  of 
human  progress.  It  was  a  truth  that  had  long  been 
forgotten  by  the  strenuous  humanitarians  who  ruled 
the  nineteenth  century,  so  anxious  to  perpetuate  and 
multiply  all  the  worst  spawn  of  their  humanity.  Yet  it 
was  an  ancient  truth,  carried  into  practice,  however 
unconsciously  and  instinctively,  by  Man  throughout 
his  upward  course,  probably  even  from  Palaeolithic 
times,  and  when  it  ceased  Man’s  upward  course  also 
ceased.  As  Carr-Saunders  has  shown,  in  a  learned  and 
comprehensive  work  which  is  of  primary  importance 
for  the  understanding  of  the  history  of  Man,  almost 
every  people  on  the  face  of  the  earth  has  adopted  one 
or  more  practices  —  notably  infanticide,  abortion,  or 
severe  restriction  of  sexual  intercourse  —  adapted  to 
maintain  due  selection  of  the  best  stocks  and  to  limit 
the  excess  of  fertility.  They  largely  ceased  to  work 
because  Man  had  acquired  the  humanity  which  was 
repelled  by  such  methods  and  lost  the  intelligence  to 

or  suppose  that  Plato,  who  wished  to  do  away  with  imaginative  literature 
as  liable  to  demoralise,  had  possessed  the  influence  he  desired,  how  in¬ 
finite  the  loss  to  all  mankind!  In  modern  Europe  we  not  only  propose 
such  legal  abolition;  we  actually,  however  in  vain,  carry  it  out.  We  seek 
to  reduce  all  human  existence  to  absurdity.  It  is,  at  the  best,  unneces¬ 
sary,  for  we  may  be  sure  that,  in  spite  of  our  efforts,  a  certain  amount 
of  absurdity  will  always  remain. 


CONCLUSION 


355 

sec  that  they  must  he  replaced  by  better  methods. 
For  the  process  of  human  evolution  is  nothing  more 
than  a  process  of  sifting,  and  where  that  sifting  ceases 
evolution  ceases,  becomes,  indeed,  devolution.1 

When  we  survey  the  history  of  Man  we  are  con¬ 
stantly  reminded  of  the  profound  truth  which  often 
lay  beneath  the  parables  of  Jesus,  and  they  might  well 
form  the  motto  for  any  treatise  on  eugenics.  Jesus 
was  constantly  seeking  to  suggest  the  necessity  of  that 
process  of  sifting  in  which  all  human  evolution  con¬ 
sists;  he  was  ever  quick  to  point  out  how  few  could  be, 
as  it  was  then  phrased,  “saved/’  how  extremely  nar¬ 
row  is  the  path  to  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven,  or,  as 
many  might  now  call  it,  the  Kingdom  of  Man.  He 
proclaimed  symbolically  a  doctrine  of  heredity  which 
is  only  to-day  beginning  to  be  directly  formulated: 
“Every  tree  that  bringeth  not  forth  good  fruit  is  hewn 
down  and  cast  into  the  fire.”  There  was  no  compunc¬ 
tion  at  ail  in  his  promulgation  of  this  radical  yet 
necessary  doctrine  for  the  destruction  of  unfit  stocks. 
Even  the  best  stocks  Jesus  was  in  favour  of  destroying 
ruthlessly  as  soon  as  they  had  ceased  to  be  the  best: 
“Ye  are  the  salt  of  the  earth:  but  if  the  salt  have  lost 
his  savour,  ...  it  is  thenceforth  good  for  nothing,  but 
to  be  cast  out,  and  to  be  trodden  under  foot  of  men.’* 
Jesus  has  been  reproached  by  Nietzsche  for  founding  a 
religion  for  slaves  and  plebeians,  and  so  in  the  result  it 

1  A.  M.  Carr-Saundera,  The  Population  Problem:  A  Study  tn  Human 
Evolution  (Qaiord  Press,  1922). 


356  THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 

may  have  become.  But  we  see  that,  in  the  words  of 
the  Teacher  as  they  have  been  handed  down,  the  reli¬ 
gion  of  Jesus  was  the  most  aristocratic  of  religions.  Its 
doctrine  embodied  not  even  the  permission  to  live  for 
those  human  stocks  which  fall  short  of  its  aristocratic 
ideal.  It  need  not  surprise  us  to  find  that  Jesus  had 
already  said  two  thousand  years  ago  what  Galton,  in  a 
more  modern  and  —  some  would  add  —  more  humane 
way,  was  saying  yesterday.  If  there  had  not  been  a 
core  of  vital  truth  beneath  the  surface  of  the  first 
Christian’s  teaching,  it  could  hardly  have  survived  so 
long.  We  are  told  that  it  is  now  dead,  but  should  it 
ever  be  revived  we  may  well  believe  that  this  is  the 
aspect  by  which  it  will  be  commended.  It  is  a  signif¬ 
icant  fact  that  at  the  two  spiritual  sources  of  our 
world,  Jesus  and  Plato,  we  find  the  assertion  of  the 
principle  of  eugenics,  in  one  implicitly,  in  the  other 
explicitly. 

Jules  de  Gaultier  was  not  concerned  to  put  forward 
an  aristocratic  conception  of  his  aesthetic  doctrine, 
and,  as  we  have  seen,  he  remained  on  the  threshold  of 
eugenics.  He  was  content  to  suggest,  though  with  no 
positive  assurance,  a  more  democratic  conception. 
He  had,  indeed,  one  may  divine,  a  predilection  for  that 
middle  class  which  has  furnished  so  vast  a  number  of 
the  supreme  figures  in  art  and  thought;  by  producing  a 
class  of  people  dispensed  from  tasks  of  utility,  he  had 
pointed  out,  “a  society  creates  for  itself  an  organ 
fitted  for  the  higher  life  and  bears  witness  that  it  has 


CONCLUSION 


357 


passed  beyond  the  merely  biological  stage  to  reach  the 
human  stage.’'  But  the  middle  class  is  not  indispen¬ 
sable,  and  if  it  is  doomed  Gaultier  saw  ways  of  replac¬ 
ing  it.1  Especially  we  may  seek  to  ensure  that,  in 
every  social  group,  the  individual  task  of  utilitarian 
work  shall  be  so  limited  that  the  worker  is  enabled  to 
gain  a  leisure  sufficiently  ample  to  devote,  if  he  has  the 
aptitude,  to  works  of  intellect  or  art.  He  would  agree 
with  Otto  Braun,  the  inspired  youth  who  was  slain  in 
the  Great  War,  that  if  we  desire  the  enablement  of  the 
people  “the  eight-hours  day  becomes  nothing  less  than 
the  most  imperative  demand  of  culture.”  It  is  in  this 
direction,  it  may  well  be,  that  social  evolution  is  mov¬ 
ing,  however  its  complete  realisation  may,  by  tem¬ 
porary  causes,  from  time  to  time  be  impeded.  The 
insistent  demand  for  increased  wages  and  diminished 
hours  of  work  has  not  been  inspired  by  the  desire  to 
raise  the  level  of  culture  in  the  social  environment,  or 
to  inaugurate  any  aesthetic  revolution,  yet,  by  “the 
law  of  irony”  which  so  often  controls  the  realisation  of 
things,  that  is  the  result  which  may  be  achieved.  The 
new  leisure  conferred  on  the  worker  may  be  trans¬ 
formed  into  spiritual  activity,  and  the  liberated  utili¬ 
tarian  energy  into  aesthetic  energy.  The  road  would 
thus  be  opened  for  a  new  human  adventure,  of  anxious 
interest,  which  the  future  alone  can  reveal. 

We  cannot  be  sure  that  this  transformation  will  take 

1  J.|  de  Gaultier,  “Art  et  Civilisation,”  Monde  Nouveau ,  February, 
1921. 


THE  DANCE  OF  LIFE 


353 

place.  We  cannot  be  sure,  indeed,  that  it  is  possible 
for  it  to  take  place  unless  the  general  quality  of  the 
population  in  whom  so  fine  a  process  must  be  effected 
is  raised  by  a  more  rigid  eugenic  process  than  there  is 
yet  any  real  determination  among  us  to  exert.  Men 
still  bow  down  before  the  fetish  of  mere  quantity  in 
population,  and  that  worship  may  be  their  undoing. 
Giant  social  organisms,  like  the  giant  animal  species  of 
early  times,  may  be  destined  to  disappear  suddenly 
when  they  have  attained  their  extreme  expansion. 

Even  if  that  should  be  so,  even  if  there  should  be  a 
solution  of  continuity  in  the  course  of  civilisation,  even 
then,  as  again  Jules  de  Gaultier  also  held,  we  need  not 
despair,  for  life  is  a  fountain  of  everlasting  exhilara¬ 
tion.  No  creature  on  the  earth  has  so  tortured  himself 
as  Man,  and  none  has  raised  a  more  exultant  Alleluia. 
It  would  still  be  possible  to  erect  places  of  refuge, 
cloisters  wherein  life  would  yet  be  full  of  joy  for  men 
and  women  determined  by  their  vocation  to  care  only 
for  beauty  and  knowledge,  and  so  to  hand  on  to  a 
future  race  the  living  torch  of  civilisation.  When  we 
read  Falladius,  when  we  read  Rabelais,  we  realise  how 
vast  a  field  lies  open  for  human  activity  between  the 
Thebaid  on  one  side  and  Thelema  on  the  other.  Out 
of  such  ashes  a  new  world  might  well  arise.  Sunset  is 
the  promise  of  dawn. 


THE  END 


,  INDEX 


INDEX 


Abortion,  once  piactised,  354. 

Absolute,  the,  a  fiction,  101. 

Abyssian  Church,  dancing  in  worship  of, 
45- 

Acting,  music,  and  poetry,  proceed  in  one 
stream,  36. 

Adam,  Villiers  de  l’lsle,  his  story  Le 
Secret  de  Vancienne  Musique,  25. 

Addison,  Joseph,  his  style,  161-63,  184. 

Adler,  Dr.  Alfred,  of  Vienna,  336,  337. 

Adolescence,  idealisation  in,  107,  108. 

Eschylus,  developed  technique  of  danc¬ 
ing,  56- 

Esthetic  contemplation,  314,  315,  325, 
326;  recognised  by  the  Greeks,  330, 
331;  two  kinds  of,  that  of  spectator 
and  that  of  participator,  331,  332;  the 
Shaftesbury  attitude  toward,  332,  333; 
the  Swift  attitude  toward,  333 ;  involves 
life  as  a  spectacle,  333,  334;  and  the 
systems  of  Gaultier  and  Russell,  343; 
engenders  neither  hatred  nor  envy, 
346.  # 

Esthetic  instinct,  to  replace  moralities, 
religions,  and  laws,  340,  341,  343-45; 
differentiated  from  other  instincts, 
346;  has  the  character  of  morality, 
346- 

.Esthetic  intuitionism,  260,  276,  279, 
3r4-  . 

Esthetic  sense,  development  of,  indis¬ 
pensable  for  civilisation,  345;  realises 
morality  when  unburdened  with  moral 
intentions,  346;  mixed  with  primitive 
manifestations  of  life,  350;  correlated 
with  diffused  artistic  instinct,  350  n.\ 
seems  to  be  decreasing,  350-52. 

Esthetics,  and  ethics,  among  the  Greeks, 
247;  with  us,  348;  in  the  Greek  sense, 
263;  the  founders  of,  271,  329;  and  art, 
the  unlikeness  of,  3  2  5-2  8 ;  on  same  plane 
with  mysticism,  330  n. 

Africa,  love-dance  in,  46,  49,  50. 

Akhenaten,  28. 

Alaro,  in  Mallorca,  dancing  in  church  at, 

44,  45-  . 

Alberti,  Leo,  vast-ranging  ideas  of,  5. 

Alcohol,  consumption  of,  as  test  of  civili¬ 
sation,  295,  296. 

Anatomy,  studied  by  Leonardo  da  Vinci, 
120. 

Anaximander,  89. 

Ancestry,  the  force  of,  in  handwriting, 
157,  158;  in  style,  158-61,  190. 

Anna,  Empress,  59. 


Antisthenes,  249  n. 

“Appearance,”  219  n. 

Aquinas,  Saint  Thomas,  202. 

Arabs,  dancing  among,  38. 

Arbuckle,  one  of  the  founders  of  sesthet- 
ics,  271;  insisted  on  imagination  as 
formative  of  character,  272. 

Architecture.  See  Building. 

Aristophanes,  31 1. 

Aristotle, .  89;  on  tragedy,  56;  on  the 
Mysteries,  242;  on  the  moral  quality  of 
an  act,  248;  his  use  of  the  term  “moral 
sense,”  273;  on  Art  and  Nature  in  the 
making  of  the  State,  313;  his  use  of  the 
term  “artists,”  313;  his  view  of  poetry, 
318;  and  the  contemplative  life,  330  n. 

Art,  life  as,  more  difficult  to  realise  than  to 
act,  1,2;  universe  conceived  as  work  of, 
by  the  primitive  philosopher,  1 ;  life  as, 
views  of  finest  thinkers  of  China  and 
Greece  on,  2-6,  247—52;  whole  concep¬ 
tion  of,  has  been  narrowed  and  debased, 
6,  7;  in  its  proper  sense,  7,  8;  as  the 
desire  for  beautification,  8;  of  living, 
has  been  decadent  during  the  last  two 
thousand  years,  8  n .;  Napoleon  in  the 
sphere  of,  10;  of  living,  the  Lifuan, 
13-18;  of  living,  the  Chinese,  27; 
Chinese  civilisation  shows  that  human 
life  is,  30;  of  living,  T’ung’s  story  the 
embodiment  of  the  Chinese  symbol  of, 
33;  life  identical  with,  33-35;  of  danc¬ 
ing,  36,  51-67,  see  Dancing;  of  life,  a 
dance,  66,  67;  science  and,  no  distinc¬ 
tion  between,  in  classic  times,  68; 
science  and,  distinction  between,  in 
modern  times,  68-70;  science  is  of  the 
nature  of,  71;  represented  by  Pytha¬ 
goras  as  source  of  science,  74;  Greek, 
76  n. ;  of  thinking,  68-140,  see  Thinking; 
the  solution  of  the  conflicts  of  philos¬ 
ophy  in,  82,  83;  philosophy  and,  close 
relationship  of,  83-85;  impulse  of, 
transformed  sexual  instinct,  108-12; 
and  mathematics,  138-40;  of  writing, 
141-190,  see  Writing;  Man  added  to 
Nature,  is  the  task  in,  153;  the  freedom 
and  the  easiness  of,  do  not  necessarily 
go  together,  182;  of  religion,  191-243, 
see  Religion;  of  morals,  244-84,  see 
Morals;  the  critic  of,  a  critic  of  life, 
269;  civilisation  is  an,  301,  310;  con¬ 
sideration  of  the  question  of  the  def¬ 
inition  of,  310-12;  Nature  and,  312, 
313;  the  sum  of  the  active  energies  of 


INDEX 


362 

mankind,  313;  and  aesthetics,  the  un¬ 
likeness  of,  314,  315,  325-28;  a  genus, 
of  which  morals  is  a  species,  316;  each, 
has  its  own  morality,  318;  to  assert 
that  it  gives  pleasure  a  feeble  conclu¬ 
sion,  319;  on  the  uselessness  of,  ac¬ 
cording  to  Schopenhauer  and  others, 
319-21;  meaninglessness  of  the  state¬ 
ment  that  it  is  useless,  322;  sociological 
function  of,  323,  324;  philosophers 
have  failed  to  see  that  it  has  a  morality 
of  its  own,  324,  325;  for  art’s  sake, 
346,  347- 

Artist,  partakes  of  divine  nature  of  crea¬ 
tor  of  the  world,  2 ;  Napoleon  as  an,  10- 
12;  the  true  scientist  as,  72,  73, 112;  the 
philosopher  as,  72,  73,  85;  explanation 
of,  108-12;  Bacon’s  definition  of,  Man 
added  to  Nature,  153;  makes  all  things 
new,  153;  in  words,  passes  between  the 
plane  of  new  vision  and  the  plane  of 
new  creation,  170,  178;  life  always  a 
discipline  for,  277;  lays  up  his  treasure 
in  Heaven,  307;  Man  as,  310;  is  a 
maker,  312;  Aristotle’s  use  of  the  term, 
313;  reveals  Nature,  320;  has  to  effect 
a  necessary  Bovarism,  348,  349. 

Artistic  creation,  the  process  of  its  birth, 
108,  109. 

Arts,  sometimes  classic  and  sometimes 
decadent,  8  n.;  and  sciences,  68-70; 
Master  of,  69. 

“Arty”  people,  6,  7. 

“As  if,”  germs  of  doctrine  of,  in  Kant,  87; 
world  of,  and  Plato’s  “Ideas,”  88; 
source  of  the  phrase,  88,  89;  seen  in 
play,  89;  the  doctrine  of,  not  immune 
from  criticism,  102;  fortifying  influ¬ 
ence  of  the  doctrine,  102,  103.  See 
Fiction,  Vaihinger. 

Asceticism,  has  nothing  to  do  with  nor¬ 
mal  religion,  222,  223;  among  the 
Greeks,  traced,  249  n.\  and  Christian¬ 
ity,  249  n. 

Asclepios,  the  cult  of,  197  n. 

Atavism,  in  handwriting,  157,  158;  in 
style,  153-61,  190. 

Athenjeus,  55,  353  n.;  his  book  about  the 
Greeks,  76  n. 

Atom,  a  fiction  or  an  hypothesis,  97,  338; 
the  structure  of,  97  n. 

Attraction,  force  of,  a  fiction,  98. 

Aurelius,  Marcus,  regarded  art  of  life  as 
like  the  dancer’s  art,  66;  his  statement 
of  the  mystical  core  of  religion,  207; 
adopted  aesthetic  criterion  of  moral 
action,  279. 

Australians,  religious  dances  among,  40. 

Auto-erotic  activities,  no,  ill. 

Axioms,  akin  to  fiction,  94,  95. 

Babies,  105. 

Bach,  Sebastian,  62,  31 1. 


Bacon,  Francis,  his  definition  of  the  ar¬ 
tist,  Man  added  to  Nature,  153;  his 
style  compared  with  that  of  Shake¬ 
speare,  160;  the  music  of  his  style,  163; 
heavy  and  formal  letters  of,  184;  his 
axiom,  the  right  question  is  half  the 
knowledge,  325. 

Bacon,  Roger,  on  the  sciences,  68. 

Balguy,  Rev..  John,  274. 

Ballad,  a  dance  as  well  as  song,  62. 

Ballet,  the,  chief  form  of  Romantic  danc¬ 
ing,  531  the  germ  of,  to  be  found  in 
ancient  Rome,  56;  origin  of  the  modern, 
56;  the  Italian  and  the  French,  56-58; 
decline  of,  58;  the  Russian,  58-60;  the 
Swedish,  60. 

Bantu,  the  question  of  the,  38,  45. 

Baptism,  242. 

“Barbarians,”  the  classic  use  of  the 
term,  285. 

Barebones,  Praise-God,  272. 

Baretti,  G.  M.  50. 

Bastien-Lepage,  Jules,  31 1. 

Baudelaire,  Charles,  on  vulgar  locutions, 

151. 

Baumgarten,  A.  G.,  the  commonly  ac¬ 
cepted  founder  of  aesthetics,  326. 

Bayaderes,  52. 

Bayle,  G.  L.,  261. 

“Beautiful,”  the,  among  Greeks  and 
Romans,  247,  252. 

Beauty,  developed  by  dancing,  47;  as  an 
element  of  literary  style,  176-78;  and 
the  good,  among  the  Greeks,  247; 
Plotinus’s  doctrine  of,  250,  251;  of 
virtue,  270  n.;  aesthetic  contemplation 
creates,  315,  327,  328;  and  prettiness, 
315  n .;  revelation  of,  sometimes  comes 
as  by  a  process  of  “conversion,”  328, 

329. 

Bee,  the,  an  artist,  312. 

Beethoven,  31 1;  his  Seventh  Symphony, 
62,  63. 

Beggary  in  China,  31. 

Benn,  A.  W.,  his  The  Greek  Philosophers, 
6,  252,  277  n. 

Bentham,  Jeremy,  adopted  a  fiction  for 
his  system,  99. 

Berenson,  Bernhard,  critic  of  art,  114; 
his  attitude  toward  Leonardo  da 
Vinci,  114, 117. 

Bergson,  Henri  Louis,  pyrotechnical  allu¬ 
sions  frequent  in,  23;  regards  philos¬ 
ophy  as  an  art,  83,  84;  on  clarity  in 
style,  176,  177;  his  idea  of  intuition, 
232  n.;  on  reality,  320. 

Berkeley,  George,  95. 

Bernard,  Claude,  personality  in  his  Le¬ 
mons  de  Physiologie  Experimentales,  144. 

Bible,  the,  the  source  of  its  long  life,  179. 
See  Old  Testament,  Revelation. 

Birds,  dancing  of,  36  «.,  45;  the  attitude 
of  the  poet  toward,  168. 


INDEX  363 


Birth-rate,  as  test  of  civilisation,  294, 
296,  299  n.  , 

“Bitter,”  a  moral  quality,  264. 

Blackguard,  the,  244,  245. 

Blake,  William,  on  the  Dance  of  Life,  66; 
on  the  golden  rule  of  life,  281. 

Blasco  Ibanez,  171. 

Blood,  Harvey’s  conception  of  circula¬ 
tion  of,  nearly  anticipated  by  Leon¬ 
ardo  da  Vinci,  120. 

Boisguillebert,  Pierre  Le  Pesant,  sieur  de, 
his  “barometer  of  prosperity,”  287. 

Botany,  studied  by  Leonardo  da  Vinci, 
119. 

Botticelli,  Sandro,  56. 

Bouguereau,  G.  A.,  315  n. 

Bovarism,  explanation  of,  335;  applied  to 
the  Universe,  337;  a  necessary,  effected 
by  the  artist,  348,  349. 

Brantome,  Pierre  de  B.,  his  style,  161. 

Braun,  Otto,  357. 

Breton,  Jules,  311. 

Bridges,  Robert,  272. 

Browne,  Sir  Thomas,  his  style,  161,  175, 
176,  178. 

Browning,  Robert,  113;  too  clumsy  to 
influence  others,  184. 

Brunetiere,  Ferdinand,  a  narrow-minded 
pedagogue,  125. 

Bruno,  Giordano,  207. 

Bruno,  Leonardo,  207. 

Bryce,  James,  on  democracies,  300. 

Bucher,  Karl,  on  work  and  dance,  61, 

62. 

Buckle,  H.  T.,  99. 

Buddhist  monks,  224  n. 

Building,  and  dancing,  the  two  primary 
arts,  36;  birds’  nests,  the  chief  early 
form  of,  36  n. 

Bunyan,  John,  79. 

Burton,  Robert,  as  regards  his  quota¬ 
tions,  152. 

Bury,  J.  B.,  287  n. 

Cabanel,  315  n. 

Cadiz,  the  dancing-school  of  Spain,  54. 

Camargo,  innovations  of,  in  the  ballet, 
57- 

Carlyle,  Thomas,  revelation  of  family 
history  in  his  style,  158, 159;  compared 
to  Aristophanes,  159  n.;  too  clumsy  to 
influence  others,  184. 

Carpenter,  the,  sacred  position  of,  in 
some  countries,  2. 

Carr-Saunders,  A.  M.,  on  the  social  lad¬ 
der  and  the  successful  climbers,  299, 
300;  on  selecting  the  best  stock  of 
humanity,  354. 

Cassirer,  Ernest,  on  Goethe,  137  n. 

Castanets,  54. 

Casuistry,  304  n.,  305. 

Categories,  are  fictions,  94. 

Cathedrals,  dancing  in,  44,  45. 


Ceremony,  Chinese,  22,  29;  and  music, 
Chinese  life  regulated  by,  24-26. 

Cezanne,  artist,  153,  315  n. 

Chanties,  of  sailors,  61,  62. 

Cheetham,  Samuel,  on  the  Pagan  Mys¬ 
teries,  241  n. 

Chemistry,  analogy  of,  to  life,  33-35. 

Chess,  the  Chinese  game  of,  23. 

Chiaroscuro ,  method  of,  devised  by 
Leonardo  da  Vinci,  117. 

Chidley,  Australian  philosopher,  79-82. 

China,  finest  thinkers  of,  perceived 
significance  in  life  of  conception  of  art, 
3;  art  animates  the  whole  of  life  in,  27, 
28;  beggary  in,  31. 

Chinese,  the,  the  accounts  of,  18-21; 
their  poetry,  21,  22,  29,  32;  their  eti¬ 
quette  of  politeness,  22;  the  quality  of 
play  in  their  character,  22-24;  their 
life  regulated  by  music  and  ceremony, 
24-26,  29;  their  civilisation  shows  that 
life  is  art,  27,  28,  30;  the  aesthetic 
supremacy  of,  28-30;  endurance  of 
their  civilisation,  28,  30;  their  philo¬ 
sophic  calm,  29  n. ;  decline  in  civilisation 
of,  in  last  thousand  years,  30;  their 
pottery,  32,  33;  embodiment  of  their 
symbol  of  the  art  of  living,  33. 

Chinese  life,  the  art  of  balancing  aesthetic 
temperament  and  guarding  against  its 
excesses,  29. 

Choir,  the  word,  42. 

Christian  Church,  supposed  to  have  been 
originally  a  theatre,  42. 

Christian  ritual,  the  earliest  known,  a 
sacred  dance,  42. 

Christian  worship,  dancing  in,  42-45; 
central  function  of,  a  sacred  drama,  43. 

Christianity,  Lifuan  art  of  living  under¬ 
mined  by  arrival  of,  18;  dancing  in, 
40-45;  the  ideas  of,  as  dogmas,  hy¬ 
potheses,  and  fictions,  99;  and  the 
Pagan  Mysteries,  242;  and  asceticism, 
249  n.;  the  Hebrew  mode  of  feeling 
grafted  into,  276. 

Chrysostom,  on  dancing  at  the  Eucharist, 
43- 

Church,  and  religion,  not  the  same,  228  k, 

Church  Congress,  at  Sheffield  in  1922, 
ideas  of  conversion  expressed  at,  220  n. 

Churches,  351. 

Cicero,  73,  252. 

Cinema,  educational  value  of,  138. 

Cistercian  monks,  43. 

Cistercians,  the,  347. 

Civilisation,  develops  with  conscious 
adhesion  to  formal  order,  172;  stand¬ 
ards  for  measurement  of,  285;  Nice- 
foro’s  measurement  of,  286;  on  mean¬ 
ing  of,  287;  the  word,  288;  the  art  of, 
includes  three  kinds  of  facts,  289; 
criminality  as  a  measure  of,  290,  291; 

,  creative  genius  and  general  instruction 


INDEX 


364 

in  connection  with,  291-93;  birth-rate 
as  test  of,  294;  consumption  of  luxuries 
as  test  of,  294,  295;  suicide  rate  as  test 
of,  295;  tests  of,  applied  to  France  by 
Niceforo,  295-97;  not  an  exclusive 
mass  of  benefits,  but  a  mass  of  values, 
297;  becoming  more  complex,  298; 
small  minority  at  the  top  of,  298; 
guidance  of,  assigned  to  lower  stratum, 
298,  299;  art  of  eugenics  necessary  to 
save,  299,  300;  of  quantity  and  of 
quality,  300;  not  to  be  precisely 
measured,  301;  the  more  rapidly  it 
progresses,  the  sooner  it  dies,  301;  an 
art,  301,  310;  an  estimate  of  its  value 
possible,  302;  meaning  of  Protagoras’s 
dictum  with  relation  to,  302;  measured 
by  standard  of  fine  art  (sculpture),  307, 
308;  eight  periods  of,  307,  308;  a  fresh 
race  needed  to  produce  new  period  of, 
308;  and  culture,  309;  aesthetic  sense 
indispensable  for,  345;  possible  break¬ 
up  of,  358. 

Clarity,  as  an  element  of  style,  176-78. 

Cliches,  149-51. 

Cloisters,  for  artists,  358. 

Cochez,  of  Louvain,  on  Plotinus,  249  n. 

Coleridge,  S.  T.,  his  “loud  bassoon,”  169; 
of  the  spectator  type  of  the  contem¬ 
plative  temperament,  332. 

Colour-words,  164  n. 

Colvin,  Sir  Sidney,  on  science  and  art,  70. 

Commandments,  tables  of,  253,  255. 

Communists,  French,  inspired  by  Shaftes¬ 
bury,  269. 

Community,  the,  244. 

Comte,  J.  A.,  301. 

Confucian  morality,  the,  29. 

Confucianism,  outward  manifestation  of 
Taoism,  26. 

Confucius,  consults  Lao-tze,  25,  26. 

Conrad,  Joseph,  his  knowledge  of  the  sea, 
171- 

Contemplation.  See  ^Esthetic  contem¬ 
plation. 

Convention,  and  Nature,  Hippias  makes 
distinction  between,  5. 

Conventions.  See  Traditions. 

Conversion,  a  questionnaire  on,  210  n. ;  the 
process  of,  218;  the  fundamental  fact 
of,  218,  218  ».;  essential  outlines  of, 
have  been  obscured,  220  n.;  Church¬ 
men’s  ideas  of,  220  nr,  not  the  outcome 
of  despair  or  a  retrogression,  221,  222; 
nothing  ascetic  about  it,  222;  among 
the  Greeks,  240;  revelation  of  beauty 
sometimes  comes  by  a  process  of,  328, 
329- 

Cooper,  Anthony,  261. 

Cornish,  G.  Warre,  his  article  on  “Greek 
Drama  and  the  Dance,”  56. 

Cosmos.  See  Universe. 

Courtship,  dancing  a  process  of,  46. 


Cowper,  William,  184;  influence  of 

Shaftesbury  on,  266. 

Craftsman,  the,  partakes  of  divine  na¬ 
ture  of  creator  of  the  world,  2. 

Creation,  not  the  whole  of  Man,  314. 

Creative  impulses.  See  Impulses. 

Crime,  an  effort  to  get  into  step,  245  n.; 
defined,  290;  natural,  290;  evolutive 
social,  291. 

Criminality,  as  a  measure  of  civilisation, 
290,  291. 

Critics,  of  language,  141-51;  difficulty  of 
their  task,  153  n. 

Croce,  Benedetto,  his  idea  of  art,  84;  tends 
to  move  in  verbal  circles,  84;  on  judging 
a  work  of  art,  153  n.;  on  mysticism  and 
science,  191  n.;  tends  to  fall  into  verbal 
abstraction,  324  n .;  his  idea  of  intui¬ 
tion,  232  n.,  320  n.\  on  the  critic  of  art 
as  a  critic  of  life,  269;  on  art  the  de¬ 
liverer,  318  n.\  on  union  of  sesthetic 
sense  with  artistic  instinct,  350  n. 

Croiset,  Maurice,  on  Plotinus,  249  n. 

Cromwell,  Oliver,  272. 

Cruz,  Friar  Gaspar  de,  on  the  Chinese, 
31- 

Culture,  and  civilisation,  309. 

Curiosity,  the  sexual  instinct  a  reaction  to 
the  stimulus  of,  104,  112, 

Custom,  245. 

Cuvier,  Georges,  181. 

Cymbal,  the,  53. 

Dance,  love,  among  insects,  birds,  and 
mammals,  45,  46;  among  savages,  46; 
has  gained  influence  in  the  human 
world,  48;  various  forms  of,  48,  49;  the 
complete,  49,  50;  the  seductiveness  of, 
50;  prejudice  against,  50,  51;  choral, 
Plotinus  compares  the  moral  life  of  the 
soul  to,  251,  252. 

Dance  of  Life,  the,  66,  67. 

Dancing,  and  building,  the  two  primary 
acts,  36;  possibly  accounts  for  origin  of 
birds’  nests,  36  n.;  supreme  manifesta¬ 
tion  of  physical  life  and  supreme  sym¬ 
bol  of  spiritual  life,  36;  the  significance 
of,  37;  the  primitive  expression  of 
religion  and  of  love,  37,  38,  45;  en¬ 
twined  with  human  tradition  of  war, 
labour,  pleasure,  and  education,  37;  the 
expression  of  the  whole  man,  38,  39; 
rules  the  life  of  primitive  men,  39  n.; 
religious  importance  of,  among  primi¬ 
tive  men,  39,  40;  connected  with  all 
religions,  40;  ecstatic  and  pantomimic, 
41,  42;  survivals  of,  in  religion,  42;  in 
Christian  worship,  42-45;  in  cathe¬ 
drals,  44,  45;  among  birds  and  insects, 
45;  among  mammals,  45,  46;  a  process 
of  courtship  and  novitiate  for  love,  46, 
47;  double  function  of,  47;  different 
forms  of,  48-51;  becomes  an  art,  51; 


INDEX  365 


professional,  52;  Classic  and  Romantic, 
52-60;  the  ballet,  53,  56-60;  solo,  53; 
Egyptian  and  Gaditanian,  53,  54; 
Greek,  55,  56,60;  as  morals,  60,  61,63; 
all  human  work  a  kind  of,  61,  62;  and 
music,  61-63;  social  significance  of,  60, 
61,  63,  64;  and  war,  allied,  63,  64;  im¬ 
portance  of,  in  education,  64, 65 ;  Puritan 
attack  on,  65;  is  life  itself,  65;  always 
felt  to  possess  symbolic  significance, 
66;  the  learning  of,  a  severe  discipline, 
277. 

Dancing-school,  the  function  of,  process 
of  courtship,  47. 

D’Annunzio,  Gabriele,  178. 

Danse  du  ventre,  the,  49  n. 

Dante,  311,  349;  dancing  in  his  “Para- 
diso,”  43;  intellectual  life  of,  largely 
guided  by  delight  in  beauty  of  rhyth¬ 
mic  relation  between  law  and  instance, 
73- 

Darwin,  Charles,  88;  poet  and  artist,  128, 
129;  and  St.  Theresa,  198. 

Darwin,  Erasmus,  181. 

David,  Alexandra,  his  book,  Le  Philo- 
sophe  Meh-ti  et  VI dee  de  Solidarity, 
26  n. 

Decadence,  of  art  of  living,  8  n.\  rigid 
subservience  to  rule  a  mark  of,  173. 

Degas,  315  n. 

Democracies,  the  smallest,  are  highest, 
300. 

Demography,  2S5. 

Demosthenes,  336. 

De  Quincey,  Thomas,  the  music  of  his 
style,  164. 

Descartes,  Rene,  on  arts  and  sciences,  69; 
represents  in  France  new  impetus  to 
sciences,  180;  religious,  though  man  of 
science,  208. 

Design,  the  arts  of,  36. 

Devadasis,  the,  sacred  dancing  girls,  51, 
52. 

Diaghilev,  59. 

Dickens,  Charles,  311. 

Dickinson,  G.  Lowes,  his  account  of  the 
Chinese,  20,  21 ;  his  account  of  Chinese 
poetry,  21,  22. 

Diderot,  Denis,  wide-ranging  interests  of, 
5;  translated  Shaftesbury,  268. 

“Dieta  Salutis,”  the,  43. 

Discipline,  definition  of  a,  71  n. 

“Divine  command,”  the,  255. 

“Divine  malice,”  of  Nietzsche,  155  n. 

Diving-bell,  constructed  by  Leonardo  da 
Vinci,  1 19. 

Divorces,  as  test  of  civilisation,  296. 

Doctor,  and  priest,  originally  one,  197  n., 
203. 

Dogma,  hypothesis,  and  fiction,  98,  99. 

Dogmas,  shadows  of  personal  experience, 
217. 

Dostoievsky,  F.  M.,  311,  349;  his  master¬ 


piece,  “ The  Brothers  Karamazov,"  135, 
I36- 

Drama,  Greek,  origin  of,  55,  56;  the  real 
Socrates  possibly  to  be  seen  in,  78. 

Driesch,  Hans,  on  his  own  mental  devel¬ 
opment,  216  n. 

Drum,  the  influence  of  the,  63. 

Dryden,  John,  148. 

Dujardin,  Edouard,  his  story  of  Huys- 
mans,  166;  on  Bergson’s  style,  177. 

Dumont,  Arsene,  on  civilisation,  298, 301. 

Duncan,  Isadora,  60. 

Duprat,  G.  L.,  on  morality,  34. 

Dupreel,  Professor,  on  Hippias,  6  n.\  his 
La  Legende  Socratique,  82  n.\  on  the 
Protagorean  spirit,  302  11. 

Duty,  275,  276. 

Easter,  dancing  of  priests  at,  44. 

Eckhart,  Meister,  234,  336. 

Education,  importance  of  dancing  in,  64, 
65;  Einstein’s  views  on,  137;  and 
genius,  as  tests  of  civilisation,  291-93. 

Egypt,  ancient,  dancing  in,  42;  Classical 
dancing  originated  in,  52;  the  most 
influential  dancing-school  of  all  time, 
53;  musical  instruments  associated 
with  dancing,  originated  or  developed 
in,  53;  modern,  dancing  in,  54  n .;  im¬ 
portance  of  its  civilisation,  307. 

Eight-hours  day,  the,  357. 

Einstein,  Albert,  2,  69  n.,  72;  substitutes 
new  axioms  for  old,  95;  casts  doubts 
on  Leonardo  da  Vinci’s  previsions  of 
modern  science,  120  n.;  seems  to  have 
won  a  place  beside  Newton,  133;  an 
imaginative  artist,  134;  his  fondness 
for  music,  134,  135;  his  other  artistic 
likings  and  dislikings,  135,  136;  an 
artist  also  in  his  work,  136;  his  views 
on  science,  137;  his  views  on  education, 
137,  138 ;  on  the  motives  that  attract 
people  to  science  and  art,  138,  321; 
feels  harmony  of  religion  and  science, 
207;  concerned  with  truth,  327;  and 
“science  for  science’s  sake,”  347  n. 

Eleusinian  Mysteries,  the,  240-43. 

Eliot,  George,  her  knowledge  of  the  life  of 
country  people,  171;  Tolstoy’s  opinion 
of,  311. 

Ellis,  Havelock,  childhood  of,  210,  211; 
his  period  of  emotional  and  intellectual 
expansion,  21 1;  loses  faith,  212;  influ¬ 
ence  of  Hinton’s  “Life  in  Nature ”  on, 
215-18. 

Els  Cosiers,  dancing  company,  45. 

Emerson,  R.  W.,  his  style  and  that  of 
Bacon,  161. 

Emmanuel,  his  book  on  Greek  dancing, 
55- 

Empathy,  66. 

Engineering,  professional,  Leonardo  da 
Vinci  called  the  founder  of,  11S,  119. 


INDEX 


English  laws,  98. 

English  prose  style,  Cartesian  influence 
on,  180  n. 

English  speech,  licentiousness  of,  in  the 
sixteenth  century,  148;  the  best  literary 
prose,  155,  156. 

Enjoyment,  without  possession,  343-46. 

Epictetus,  249  n. 

Epicurus,  207. 

Erosian,  river,  importance  of,  realised  by 
Leonardo  da  Vinci,  120. 

Eskimos,  255. 

Este,  Isabella  d’,  123. 

Ethics,  and  aesthetics,  among  the  Greeks, 
247. 


Etruscans,  the,  56,  308. 

Eucharist,  dancing  at  the,  43. 

Eucken,  Rudolf,  on  Shaftesbury,  271. 

Eugenics,  art  of,  necessary  for  preserva¬ 
tion  of  civilisation,  299;  Galton  the 
founder  of  the  modern  scientific  art  of, 
353;  assertion  of  principle  of,  by  Jesus, 
355,  356;  question  of  raising  quality  of 
population  by  process  of,  358. 

Eusebius,  on  the  worship  of  the  Thera- 
peuts,  42. 

Evans,  Sir  Arthur,  112. 

Evolution,  theory  of,  88, 104;  a  process  of 
sifting,  355;  and  devolution,  355;  social, 

357, 358.  .  . 

Existence,  totality  of,  Ilippias  s  supreme 
ideal,  6. 

Existing,  and  thinking,  on  two  different 
planes,  101. 

“Expression,”  324. 


Facts,  in  the  art  of  civilisation,  material, 
intellectual,  and  moral  (with  political), 
289. 

Fandango,  the,  50. 

Faraday,  Michael,  characteristics  of, 
trust  in  facts  and  imagination,  130-32; 
his  science  and  his  mysticism,  208. 

Farnell,  L.  R.,  on  religion  and  science, 
197  n. 

Farrer,  Reginald,  on  the  philosophic 
calm  of  the  Chinese,  29  n. 

Faure,  Elie,  his  conception  of  Napoleon, 
10;  on  Greek  art,  76  n.;  has  faith  in 
educational  value  of  cinema,  137;  on 
knowledge  and  desire,  154;  on  the 
Greek  spirit,  292  n. 

Ferrero,  Guglielmo,  on  the  art  impulse 
and  the  sexual  instinct,  109. 

Fiction,  germs  of  doctrine  of,  in  Kant,  87 ; 
first  expression  of  doctrine  of,  found  in 
Schiller,  89;  doctrine  of,  in  F.  A. 
Lange’s  History  of  Materialism,  93; 
Vaihinger’s  doctrine  of,  94-103;  hy¬ 
pothesis,  and  dogma,  98,  99;  of  Bova- 
rism,  335, 336;  character  constituted  by 
process  of,  336. 

Fictions,  the  variety  of,  94-100;  the  value 


of,  96,  97;  summatory,  98;  scientific 
and  aesthetic,  102;  may  alwaj's  be 
changed,  103;  good  and  bad,  103. 

Fiji,  dancing  at,  49. 

Fijians,  the,  13  n. 

Fine  arts,  the,  70;  civilisation  measured 
by  standard  of,  307;  not  to  be  pursued 
for  useful  end  outside  themselves,  322. 

Fireworks,  22,  23. 

Flaubert,  Gustave,  is  personal,  144; 
sought  to  be  most  objective  of  artists, 
182. 

Flowers,  the  attitude  of  the  poet  toward, 
168,  169. 

Flying-machines,  72  n.\  designed  by 
Leonardo  da  Vinci,  119. 

Foch,  Ferdinand,  quoted,  103. 

Fokine,  59. 

Folk-dances,  62. 

Force,  a  fiction,  96. 

Fossils,  significance  of,  discovered  b}' 
Leonardo  da  Vinci,  120. 

Fox,  George,  237. 

France,  tests  of  civilization  applied  to,  by 
Niceforo,  295-97. 

Francis  of  Assisi,  237. 

Franck,  Cesar,  mysticism  in  music  of, 
237- 

Frazer,  J.  G.,  on  magic  and  science,  195, 
196. 

Freedom,  a  fiction,  100. 

French  ballet,  the,  57,  58. 

French  speech,  its  course,  148,  149. 

Freud,  Sigmund,  in,  318  n regards 
dreaming  as  fiction,  103;  on  the  prob¬ 
ability  of  the  disappearance  of  religion, 
228  n. 

Frobisher,  Sir  Martin,  his  spelling,  173, 
174. 

Galen,  120. 

Galton,  Francis,  a  man  of  science  and  an 
artist,  126-28;  founder  of  the  modern 
scientific  art  of  eugenics,  353;  and 
Jesus’s  assertion  of  the  principle  of 
eugenics,  356. 

Games,  the  liking  of  the  Chinese  for, 

23. 

Gaultier,  Jules  de,  330  n.\  on  Buddhist 
monks,  224  n.;  on  pain  and  pleasure  in 
life,  278  n.;  on  morality  and  reason,  281; 
on  morality  and  art,  284;  on  the  anti¬ 
nomy  between  morals  and  morale, 
319;  on  beauty,  327;  on  life  as  a  spec¬ 
tacle,  333;  the  Bovarism  of,  335~37; 
his  philosophic  descent,  337;  applies 
Bovarism  to  the  Universe,  337;  his 
philosophy  seems  to  be  in  harmony 
with  physics,  338;  the  place  of  morality, 
religion,  and  law  in  his  system,  338- 
40;  place  of  the  aesthetic  instinct  in 
his  system,  341,  343~4S;  system  of, 
compared  with  Russell’s,  342,  343;  im- 


INDEX 


367 


portantre  of  development  of  aesthetic 
sense  to,  345;  and  the  idea  of  pure  art, 
346,  347;  considers  aesthetic  sense 
mixed  in  manifestations  of  life,  349, 
350;  had  predilection  for  middle  class, 
356,  357;  sees  no  cause  for  despair  in 
break-up  of  civilisation,  358. 

Gauss,  C.  F.,  religious,  though  man  of 
science,  208. 

Genesis,  Book  of,  the  fashioning  of  the 
cosmos  in,  1,  314. 

Genius,  the  birth  of,  109;  and  education, 
as  tests,  of  civilisation,  291-93;  of 
country,  and  temper  of  the  population, 
292,  293. 

Geology,  founded  by  Leonardo  da  Vinci, 
120. 

Geometry,  Protagoras’s  studies  in,  3;  a 
science  or  art,  68. 

Gibbon,  Edward,  162. 

Gide,  Andre,  322. 

Gizycki,  Georg  von,  on  Shaftesbury,  260, 
267. 

God,  a  fiction,  100,  337. 

Goethe,  J.  W.,  342;  representative  of 
ideal  of  totality  of  existence,  6;  called 
architecture  “frozen  music,”  135;  his 
power  of  intuition,  137;  his  studies  in 
mathematical  physics,  137  n.\  use  of 
word  “stamped”  of  certain  phrases, 
149;  mistook  birds,  168;  felt  harmony 
of  religion  and  science,  207;  and  Schiller 
and  Humboldt,  275. 

Gomperz,  Theodor,  his  Greek  Thinkers, 
4.  5,  6  n.,  75,  78. 

Goncourt,  Jules  de,  his  style,  182,  183. 

Goncourts,  the,  183. 

Good,  the,  and  beauty,  among  the  Greeks, 
247- 

Goodness,  and  sweetness,  in  Shaftes¬ 
bury’s  philosophy,  262;  and  sweetness, 
originally  the  same,  263;  moral,  orig¬ 
inally  expressed  in  terms  of  taste, 
263. 

Gorgias,  302. 

Gourmont,  Remy  de,  65;  his  remark  about 
pleasure,  24;  on  personality,  144;  on 
style,  177;  on  civilisation,  298;  on  the 
Jesuits,  304,  305;  on  beauty,  315; 
on  art  and  morality,  321 ;  on  sociological 
function  of  art,  323. 

Government,  as  art,  3. 

Grace,  an  element  of  style  in  writing, 
155,  156. 

Grammar,  Protagoras  the  initiator .  of 
modern,  4;  a  science  or  art,  68;  writing 
not  made  by  the  laws  of,  172,  173. 

Grammarian,  the,  the  formulator,  not 
the  lawgiver,  of  usage,  148. 

Great  Wall  of  China,  the,  28. 

Great  War,  the,  339. 

Greece,  ancient,  genius  built  upon  basis 
of  slavery  in,  292;  the  spirit  of,  292. 


Greek  art,  76  n. 

Greek  dancing,  55,  56,  60. 

Greek  drama,  55,  56,  78. 

Greek  morality,  an  artistic  balance  of 
light  and  shade,  260. 

Greek  speech,  the  best  literary  prose, 
r55- 

Greek  spirit,  the,  76  n. 

Greeks,  attitude  of  thinkers  of,  on  life  as 
art,  3,  247-53;  the.  pottery  of,  32;  im¬ 
portance  of  dancing  and  music  in 
organisation  of  some  states  of,  64; 
books  on,  written  by  barbarians,  76  n.; 
mysticism  of,  205-07, 240-43 ;  spheres  of 
ethics  and  aesthetics  not  distinguished 
among,  247;  had  a  kind  of  aesthetic 
morality,  316-18;  recognised  destruc¬ 
tion  of  ethical  and  intellectual  virtues, 
330;  a  small  minority  of  abnormal 
persons  among,  353  n. 

Greenslet,  Ferris,  on  the  Cartesian 
influence  on  English  prose  style,  180  n. 

Groos,  Karl,  his  “the  play  of  inner  imita¬ 
tion,”  66;  has  developed  aesthetic  side 
of  miterleben,  332. 

Grosse,  on  the  social  significance  of 
dancing,  63,  64. 

Grote,  George,  his  chapter  on  Socrates, 
76; 

Grotius,  Hugo,  261. 

Guitar,  the,  an  Egyptian  instrument,  53. 

Gumplowicz,  Ludwig,  on  civilisation,  301. 

Gunpowder,  use  made  of,  by  Chinese,  22, 
23- 

Guy  au,  insisted  on  sociological  function 
of  art,  323,  324;  believes  that  poets 
and  artists  will  be  priests  of  social 
religion  without  dogmas,  349,  350. 

Gypsies,  possible  origin  of  the  name 
“  Egyptians”  as  applied  to  them,  54  n. 

Pladfield,  Emma,  her  account  of  the  life 
of  the  natives  of  the  Loyalty  Islands, 
13-18. 

Hakluyt,  Richard,  143;  his  picture  of 
Chinese  life,  19. 

Hall,  Stanley,  on  importance  of  danc¬ 
ing,  64,  65;  on  the  beauty  of  virtue, 
270  n. 

Handel,  G.  F.,  62. 

Handwriting,  partly  a  matter  of  individ¬ 
ual  instinct,  156,  157;  the  complexity 
and  mystery  enwrapping,  157;  resem¬ 
blances  in,  among  membersof  thesame 
family,  157,  158;  atavism  in,  157,  158. 

Hang-Chau,  20. 

Hardy,  Thomas,  his  lyrics,  170  n .;  his 
sensitivity  to  the  sounds  of  Nature, 
171 ;  his  genius  unquestioned,  187  n. 

Hawaii,  dancing  in,  51. 

Hawthorne,  Nathaniel,  his  style,  161. 

Hebrews,  their  conception  of  the  fashion¬ 
ing  of  the  universe,  1;  ancient,  their 


INDEX 


368 

priests  and  their  prophets,  203;  never 
conceived  of  the  art  of  morals,  253; 
were  no  aesthetic  intuitionists,  276. 

Hegel,  G.  W.  F.,  90;  poetic  quality  of  his 
philosophy,  84;  his  attempt  to  trans¬ 
form  subjective  processes  into  ob¬ 
jective  world-processes,  101. 

Heine,  Heinrich,  155  n. 

Hellenism,  the  revivalists  of,  271. 

Helmholtz,  H.  L.  F.,  science  and  art  in, 
72. 

Hemelverdeghem,  Salome  on  Cathedral 
at,  49  n. 

Heraclitus,  74. 

Herder,  J.  G.  von,  his  Ideen  zur  Ge- 
schichte  der  Menschheit,  88;  inspired  by 
Shaftesbury,  268. 

Heredity,  in  handwriting,  157,  158;  in 
style,  158-61,  190;  tradition  the  cor¬ 
poreal  embodiment  of,  161. 

Hincks,  Marcella  Azra,  on  the  art  of 
dancing  in  Japan,  42  n. 

Hindu  dance,  41. 

Hinton,  James,  on  thinking  as  an  art,  86  n. ; 
on  the  arts,  hi  ;  the  universe  according 
to,  215,  216;  Ellis’s  copy  of  his  book, 
220;  on  pleasure  and  pain  in  the  art  of 
life,  278;  on  methods  of  arts  and  moral 
action,  281,  282. 

Hippias,  302;  significance  of  his  ideas,  in 
conception  of  life  as  an  art,  4-6;  his 
ideal,  4,  6;  the  Great  Logician,  6  n. 

Hobbes,  Thomas,  on  space,  95;  his 
dictum  Homo  homini  lupus,  262. 

Hodgson,  Shadworth,  289. 

Hoffman,  Bernhard,  his  Guide  to  the  Bird- 
World,  168. 

Horace,  the  popularity  of,  in  modern 
times,  92.  ^ 

Hovelaque,  Emile,  on  the  Chinese,  27,  28. 

Howell,  James,  his  “Familiar  Letters,” 
184. 

Hugo,  Victor,  149,  31 1. 

Hula  dance,  the,  51. 

Humboldt,  Wilhelm  von,  275. 

Hume,  David,  took  up  fictional  point  of 
view,  96;  recognised  Shaftesbury,  267; 
influenced  by  Hutcheson,  275. 

Hunt,  Leigh,  sensitively  acute  critic  of 
Keats,  167. 

Hunter,  John,  181. 

Hutcheson,  Francis,  sesthetic  moralist, 
251;  came  out  of  Calvinistic  Puritan¬ 
ism,  266;  one  of  the  founders  of  aesthet¬ 
ics,  271,  326  n.\  wrote  the  first  modern 
treatise  on  aesthetics,  271;  represented 
reaction  against  Puritanism,  271; 
Shaftesbury’s  ideas  as  developed  by, 
273;  his  use  of  the  term  “moral  sense,” 

273,  274;  his  impressive  personality, 
274;  philosophy  was  art  of  living  to, 

274,  275;  inconsistent,  314;  on  distinc¬ 
tion  between  art  and  aesthetics,  326  n.; 


his  idea  of  the  aesthetic  and  the  moral 
emotion,  327  n. 

Huysmans,  J.  K.,  his  vocabulary,  165;  at 
Wagner  concert,  166;  fascinated  by 
concert  programmes,  166,  167. 

“Hymn  of  Jesus,”  the,  42. 

Hypothesis,  dogma,  and  fiction,  98,  99. 

/  and  me,  147. 

Idealisation,  in  adolescence,  107,  108. 

Idealism,  83.  I 

Idealists,  70,  341  n. 

Ideals,  are  fictions,  100. 

Imagination,  a  constitutive  part  of 
thinking,  102;  man  lives  by,  102; 
guarded  by  judgment  and  principles, 
130-32;  part  performed  by,  in  morals, 
272;  and  the  aesthetic  instinct,  344. 

Imbeciles,  352-55- 

Imitation,  in  the  productions  of  young 
writers,  164. 

Immoral,  significance  of  the  word,  246. 

Immortality,  a  fiction,  100. 

Impulses,  creative  and  possessive,  306, 
307,  341-43. 

Inclination,  275. 

India,  dancing  in,  51,  52;  the  Todas  of, 
203  n. 

Indians,  American,  religious  dances 
among,  40,  42.  „ 

Infanticide,  255,  354. 

Infinite,  the,  a  fiction,  95. 

Infinitive,  the  split,  145-47. 

Inge,  Dean,  on  Plotinus,  223  n.,  249 
on  Pagan  Mysteries,  241  n. 

Innate  ideas,  274. 

Insects,  dancing  among,  45. 

Instinct,  the  part  it  plays  in  style,  163; 
imitation  a  part  of,  164;  and  tradition, 
mould  morals,  254-59;  the  possessive, 
338-40,  344,  345,  351,  see  Possessive 
instinct;  the  sesthetic,  341,  343-46, 
350,  see  ^Esthetic  instinct. 

Instincts,  234,  235. 

Intelligence,  the  sphere  of,  233,  234. 

Intuition,  the  starting  point  of  science, 
137;  meaning  of,  232  n.\  of  the  man  of 
genius,  320. 

Intuitionism,  sesthetic,  260,  276,  279,, 
314- 

Intuitionists,  the,  232-34. 

Invention,  necessary  in  science,  137.  1 

Invincible  ignorance,  doctrine  of,  304. 

Irony,  Socratic,  78,  83. 

Irrationalism,  of  Vaihinger,  90. 

Isocrates,  on  beauty  and  virtue,  247. 

Italy,  Romantic  dancing  originated  in, 
53,  56;  the  ballet  in,  56-58. 

Jansenists,  the,  303. 

Japan,  dancing  in,  42,  49. 

Java,  dancing  in,  49. 

Jehovah,  in  the  Book  of  Genesis,  I. 


INDEX 


Jeremiah,  the  prophet,  his  voice  and  in¬ 
strument,  178,  179. 

Jeres,  cathedral  of,  dancing  in,  44. 

Jesuits,  the,  303-05- 

Jesus,  and  Napoleon,  10,  11;  and  the 
Platonic  Socrates,  82,  83;  asserts  prin¬ 
ciple  of  eugenics,  353,  356;  and  Plato, 
356. 

Joel,  Karl,  on  the  Xenophontic  Socrates, 
78;  on  the  evolution  of  the  Greek 
philosophic  spirit,  206. 

John  of  the  Cross,  237. 

Johnson,  Samuel,  the  pedantry  of,  156; 
Latin-French  element  in,  162;  his  idea 
of  “matter,”  230. 

Johnston,  Sir  H.  H.,  on  the  dancing  of 
the  Pygmies,  51. 

Jones,  Dr.  Bence,  biographer  of  Faraday, 
130. 

Jonson,  Ben,  184. 

Joyce,  James,  172,  184;  his  Ulysses,  185, 
186. 

Kant,  Immanuel,  89;  germs  of  the  doc¬ 
trine  of  the  “as  if”  in,  87;  his  idea  of 
the  art  of  morals,  253,  254;  influenced 
by  Shaftesbury,  253,  254,  266;  anec¬ 
dote  about,  257  276;  rationalises 

morality,  281. 

Keats,  John,  concerned  with  beautiful 
words  in  “The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes,”  167. 

Kepler,  Johann,  his  imagination  and  his 
accuracy  in  calculation,  132,  133. 

Keyserling,  Count  Hermann,  his  Philo¬ 
sophic  als  Kunst,  83  n. 

“Knowing,”  analysis  of,  70,  71. 

Kolbe,  Rev.  Dr.,  illustrates  aesthetic  view 
of  morals,  276  n. 

Lamb,  Charles,  184. 

Landor,  W.  S.,  149;  on  vulgarisms  in  lan¬ 
guage,  1 51  on  the  poet  and  poetry, 
154,  172;  on  style,  163. 

Lange,  F.  A.,  his  The  History  of  Materi¬ 
alism,  73  n.,  83;  sets  forth  conception 
of  philosophy  as  poetic  art,  83;  the 
Neo-Kan tism  of,  87;  his  influence  on 
Vaihinger,  92,  93. 

Language,  critics  of  present-day,  141-51; 
of  our  forefathers  and  of  to-day,  143; 
things  we  are  told  to  avoid  in,  145-51; 
is  imagery  and  metaphor,  165;  reaction 
of  thought  on,  179-81;  progress  in,  due 
to  flexibility  and  intimacy,  183. 

Languages,  the  Yo-heave-ho  theory  of, 
61. 

Lankester,  Sir  E.  Ray,  70. 

Lao-tze,  and  Confucius,  25,  26;  the 
earliest  of  the  great  mystics,.  204; 
harmony  of  religion  and  science  in  his 
work,  204,  205. 

Law,  a  restraint  placed  upon  the  pos¬ 
sessive  instinct,  339,  34°;  to  be  re¬ 


369 

placed  by  aesthetic  instinct,  340,  341. 

Laycock,  on  handwriting,  158  n. 

Leibnitz,  Baron  S.  W.  von,  6  «.;  on 
space,  95;  on  music,  135;  admired 
Shaftesbury,  268. 

“L’Esprit  Nouveau,”  179. 

Libby,  M.  F.,  on  Shaftesbury,  273. 

Lie,  Jonas,  163. 

Life,  more  difficult  to  realise  it  as  an  art 
than  to  act  it  so,  1,  2;  as  art,  view  of 
highest  thinkers  of  China  and  Greece 
on,  2-6,  247-52;  ideal  of  totality  of,  6; 
art  of,  has  been  decadent  during  last 
two  thousand  years,  8  n. ;  of  the  Loy¬ 
alty  Islanders,  13-18;  the  Lifuan  art 
of,  13-18;  the  Chinese  art  of,  27,  28; 
Chinese  civilization  proves  that  it  is 
art,  30;  embodiment  of  the  Chinese 
symbol  of  the  art  of,  33;  identical  with 
art,  33-35;  the  art  of,  a  dance,  66, 
67;  mechanistic  explanation  of,  216; 
viewed  in  its  moral  aspect,  244;  the 
moralist  the  critic  of  the  art  of,  247; 
as  art,  attitude  of  Romans  toward,  252 ; 
as  art,  attitude  of  Hebrews  toward,  253; 
the  art  of,  both  pain  and  pleasure  in, 
277,  278;  as  art,  a  conception  approved 
by  men  of  high  character,  278,  279; 
not  to  be  precisely  measured  by  statis¬ 
tics,  302;  as  a  spectacle,  333,  334. 

Lifu.  See  Loyalty  Islands. 

Lifuans,  the,  the  art  of  living  of,  13-18. 

Limoges,  44. 

Linnsan  system,  the,  a  fiction,  99. 

Liszt,  Franz,  329. 

Livingstone,  David,  38. 

Locke,  John,  and  Shaftesbury,  261,  262. 

Locomotive,  the,  72  n. 

Lodge,  Sir  Oliver,  his  attempt  to  study 
religion,  201. 

Logic,  a  science  or  art,  68;  and  fiction, 
94;  of  thought,  inescapable,  183. 

Loret,  on  dancing,  54  n. 

Love,  dancing  the  primitive  expression  of, 
37,  45;  curiosity  one  of  the  main  ele¬ 
ments  of,  1 12. 

Love-dance,  45-51.  See  Dance,  Dancing. 

Loyalty  Islands,  the,  customs  of  the  na¬ 
tives  of,  13-18. 

Lucian,  353  n.\  on  dancing,  40,  45. 

Lucretius,  207. 

Lull,  Ramon,  237. 

Lulli,  J.  B.,  brought  women  into  the  bal¬ 
let,  57- 

Luxuries,  consumption  of,  as  test  of 
civilisation,  294-97. 

Machinery  of  life,  216. 

Madagascar,  dancing  in,  49. 

Magic,  relation  of,  to  science  and  religion, 
193-96. 

Magna  Carta,  98. 

Malherbe,  Francois  de,  148. 


INDEX 


370 

Mallarm6,  Stdphane,  music  the  voice  of 
the  world  to,  166. 

Mallorca,  dancing  in  church  in,  44,  45. 

Mammals,  dancing  among,  45,  46. 

Man,  has  found  it  more  difficult  to  con¬ 
ceive  life  as  an  art  than  to  act  it  so,  1  ; 
his  conception  less  that  of  an  artist, 
as  time  went  on,  2;  in  Protagoras’s 
philosophy,  3,  4,  302;  ceremony  and 
music,  his  external  and  internal  life, 
25;  added  to  Nature,  153;  has  passed 
through  stages  of  magic,  religion,  and 
science,  196;  an  artist  of  his  own  life, 
271;  is  an  artist,  310;  as  artist  and  as 
aesthetician,  314;  becomes  the  greatest 
force  in  Nature,  339;  practices  adopted 
by,  to  maintain  selection  of  best  stock, 
354- 

Mandeville,  Sir  John,  on  Shaftesbury, 
262. 

Manet,  311. 

Marco  Polo,  his  picture  of  Chinese  life, 
19,  20;  noticed  absence  of  beggars  in 
China,  31 ;  on  public  baths  in  China,  32. 

Marett,  on  magic  and  science,  195. 

Marlowe,  Christopher,  170,  184. 

Marquesans,  the,  13  n. 

Marriott,  Charles,  on  the  union  of  aesthet¬ 
ic  sense  with  artistic  instinct,  350  n. 

Martial,  54. 

Mass,  dancing  in  ritual  of,  43-45 ;  analogy 
of  Pagan  Mysteries  to,  242. 

Master  of  Arts,  69. 

Materialism,  97,  230. 

Materialistic,  the  term,  229. 

Mathematical  Renaissance,  the,  69. 

Mathematics,  false  ideas  in,  94,  95; 
and  art,  138-40. 

Matter,  a  fiction,  97,  229, 338;  and  spirit, 
229,  230. 

Maupassant,  Guy  de,  311. 

McDougall,  William,  accepts  magic  as 
origin  of  science,  195;  his  criticism  of 
the  “moral  sense,”  274  n his  study  of 
civilisation,  298;  on  birth-rate,  298  n. 

Me  and  I,  147. 

Mead,  G.  R.,  his  article  The  Sacred 
Dance  of  Jesus,  44. 

Measurement,  Protagoras’s  saying  con¬ 
cerning,  3,  302. 

Mechanics,  beginning  of  science  of,  74; 
theories  of,  studied  by  Leonardo  da 
Vinci,  120. 

Medici,  Catherine  de’,  brought  Italian 
ballet  to  Paris,  57. 

Medicine,  and  religion,  197  n.,  203. 

Medicine-man,  the,  192-95. 

Meh-ti,  Chinese  philosopher,  26,  27. 

Men,  of  to-day  and  of  former  days,  their 
comparative  height,  142. 

“Men  of  science,”  125,  126.  See  Scien¬ 
tist. 

Meteorological  Bureau,  the,  203.  Uv.  t 


Metre,  poetic,  arising  out  of  work,  62. 

Michelangelo,  31 1. 

Milan,  the  ballet  in,  58. 

Mill,  J.  S.,  on  science  and  art,  70;  criti¬ 
cism  of  Bentham,  99. 

Millet,  J.  F.,  311. 

Milton,  John,  his  misuse  of  the  word 
“eglantine,”  169;  Tolstoy’s  opinion  of, 
3ii- 

Mirandola,  Pico  della,  6  n. 

Mittag-Lefler,  Gustav,  on  mathematics, 
139- 

Mobius,  Paul  Julius,  German  psycholo¬ 
gist,  109. 

Moissac,  Salome  capital  in,  49  n. 

Montaigne,  M.  E.  de,  his  style  flexible 
and  various,  148;  his  quotations 
moulded  to  the  pattern  of  his  own 
mind,  152;  his  style  and  that  of  Renan, 
161;  the  originality  of  his  style  found 
in  vocabulary,  165. 

Montesquieu,  Baron  de,  his  admiration 
for  Shaftesbury,  268;  on  the  evils  of 
civilisation,  297. 

Moral,  significance  of  the  term,  246. 

Moral  maxims,  254,  258. 

Moral  reformer,  the,  282. 

“Moral  sense,”  the  term  as  used  by 
Hutcheson  and  Shaftesbury,  273,  274; 
in  McDougall’s  Social  Psychology, 
274  n. 

Moral  teaching,  246  n. 

Moral  World-Order,  the,  a  fiction,  100. 

Morand,  Paul,  170  n. 

Moreau,  Gustave,  167. 

Morgagni,  G.  B.,  300. 

Morris,  William,  350  n. 

Moses,  253,  282. 

Moszkowski,  Alexander,  his  book  on  Ein¬ 
stein,  134  n. 

Moralist,  the  critic  of  the  art  of  life,  247. 

Morality,  Greek,  an  artistic  balance  of 
light  and  shade,  260;  a  matter  of  taste, 
263;  the  aesthetic  quality  of,  evidenced 
by  language,  263,  264;  Shaftesbury’s 
views  on,  264-66;  the  influence  of 
Shaftesbury  on  our  modern,  266,  267; 
imagination  in,  272;  instinctive,  ac¬ 
cording  to  Hutcheson,  274;  concep¬ 
tion  of,  as  an  art,  does  not  lack  se¬ 
riousness,  276;  the  aesthetic  view  of, 
advocated  by  Catholics,  276  n.\  the 
aesthetic  view  of,  repugnant  to  two 
classes  of  minds,  280-82;  indefiniteness 
of  criterion  of,  an  advantage,  282,  283; 
justification  of  aesthetic  conception  of, 
283,  284;  flexible  and  inflexible,  il¬ 
lustrated  by  Jesuits  and  Pascal,  303- 
05;  art  the  reality  of,  314;  aesthetic,  of 
the  Greeks,  316-18;  the  antinomy  be¬ 
tween  morals  and,  319;  a  restraint 
placed  upon  the  possessive  instinct, 
338-40;  to  be  replaced  by  aesthetic 


INDEX 


instinct,  340,  341;  aesthetic  instinct 
has  the  character  of,  346. 

Morals,  dancing  as,  61,  63,  66;  books  on, 
244;  defined,  245;  means  custom,  245; 
Plotinus’s  conception  of,  250-52 ;  as  art, 
views  of  the  Greeks  and  the  Romans 
on,  differ,  252.  Hebrews  never  con¬ 
ceived  of  the  art  of,  253;  as  art,  modern 
conception  of,  253 ;  the  modern  feeling 
about,  is  Jewish  and  Roman,  253; 
Kant’s  idea  of  the  art  of,  253,  254; 
formed  by  instinct,  tradition  and 
reason,  254-59;  Greek,  have  come  to 
modern  world  through  Shaftesbury, 
267;  the  aesthetic  attitude  possible  for 
spectator  of,  270;  art  and  aesthetics  to 
be  kept  apart  in,  314,  315,  325-28; 
a  species  of  the  genus  art,  316;  the 
antinomy  between  morality  and,  319; 
philosophers  have  failed  to  see  that  it 
is  an  art,  324. 

Morisco,  the,  49  n. 

Mozart,  Wolfgang,  his  interest  in  danc¬ 
ing,  62. 

Miiller-Freienfels,  Richard,  two  kinds  of 
aesthetic  contemplation  defined  by,  331 . 

Multatuli,  quoted  on  the  source  of 
curiosity,  112. 

Music,  and  ceremony,  24-26;  and  acting, 
and  poetry,  36 ;  and  singing,  and  danc¬ 
ing,  their  relation,  62;  a  science  or  art, 
68;  discovery  of  Pythagoras  in,  74;  phil¬ 
osophy  the  noblest  and  best,  81  n.\  the 
most  abstract,  the  most  nearly  math¬ 
ematical  of  the  arts,  135;  of  style, 
163,  164;  of  philosophy  and  religion, 
179- 

Musical  forms,  evolved  from  similar 
dances,  62. 

Musical  instruments,  53,  54. 

Musset,  Alfred  de,  his  Confession  d'un 
Enfant  du  Siecle,  144. 

Mysteries,  the  Eleusinian,  240-43. 

Mystic,  the  genuine,  202;  Lao-tze,  the 
earliest  great,  204. 

Mystics,  the  great,  236,  237. 

Mysticism,  the  right  use  and  the  abuse 
of  the  word,  191 ;  and  science,  supposed 
difference  between,  191-203;  what  is 
meant  by,  192;  and  science,  the  har¬ 
mony  of,  as  revealed  in  human  history, 
203-08;  of  the  Greeks,  205-07, 240-43; 
and  science,  the  harmony  of,  as  sup¬ 
ported  by  personal  experience  of  Have¬ 
lock  Ellis,  209-18;  and  science,  how 
they  came  to  be  considered  out  of 
harmony,  226-35;  and  science,  har¬ 
mony  of,  summary  of  considerations 
confirming,  235,  236;  the  key  to  much 
that  is  precious  in  art  and  Nature  in, 
237,  238;  is  not  science,  238-40;  £es- 
thetics  on  same  plane  as,  330  n.  See 
Religion. 


371 

Napoleon,  described  as  unmitigated 
scoundrel  by  H.  G.  Wells,  8-10;  de¬ 
scribed  as  lyric  artist  by  Llie  Faure,  10. 

Nature,  and  convention,  Hippias  made 
distinction  between,  5;  comes  through 
an  atmosphere  which  is  the  emanation 
of  supreme  artists,  166;  the  attitude  of 
the  poet  in  the  face  of,  168,  169;  the 
object  of  Leonardo  da  Vinci’s  search¬ 
ings,  114, 117, 125;  Man  added  to,  153; 
communion  with,  227;  in  Shaftesbury’s 
system,  265;  and  art,  312,  313. 

Neo-Platonists,  the,  237;  asceticism  in, 
249  n. 

Nests,  birds’,  and  dancing,  36  n. 

Newell,  W.  W.,  41  n. 

Newman,  Cardinal  J.  H.,  the  music  of 
his  style,  164. 

Newton,  Sir  Isaac,  his  wonderful  imagi¬ 
nation,  72;  his  force  of  attraction  a 
summatory  fiction,  98;  represents  in 
England  new  impetus  to  sciences,  180; 
his  attempt  to  study  religion,  199-201; 
religious,  though  a  man  of  science,  208. 

Niceforo,  Alfred,  his  measurement  of 
civilisation,  286,  293,  297;  tests  of 
civilisation  applied  to  France  by,  295- 
97- 

Nietzsche,  Friedrich,  111;  conceived  the 
art  of  life  as  a  dance,  66,  67;  poetic 
quality  of  his  philosophy,  84;  Vai- 
hinger’s  opinion  of,  94;  on  Leonardo 
da  Vinci,  1 15 ;  the  “divine  malice”  of, 
155  n.\  laboured  at  his  prose,  182;  de¬ 
molished  D.  F.  Strauss’s  ideas,  215;  on 
learning  to  dance,  277  _;  his  gospel  of 
taste,  280;  on  the  Sophists,  302  n.;  on 
art  as  the  great  stimulus  of  life,  322, 
323;  on  the  world  as  a  spectacle,  334, 
335;  moved  by  the  “masculine  pro¬ 
test,”  336;  Jesus  reproached  by,  355. 

Novelists,  their  reservoirs  of  knowledge, 
171- 

No  ver  re,  and  the  ballet,  57. 

Ockham,  William  of,  96. 

Old  Testament,  the,  and  the  conception 
of  morality  as  an  art,  276.  See  Bible, 
Genesis. 

Omahas,  the,  46. 

Onions,  C.  T.,  146  n. 

Optimism,  and  pessimism,  90-92. 

Origen,  on  the  dancing  of  the  stars,  43. 

Orpheus,  fable  of,  61. 

Osier,  Sir  William,  72. 

Pacific,  the,  creation  as  conceived  in,  2; 
dancing  in,  49.  See  Lifuans. 

Pain,  and  pleasure,  united,  278. 

Painting,  Chinese,  29,  32;  and  sculpture, 
and  the  arts  of  design,  36;  of  Leonardo 
da  Vinci,  113,  114,  117,  118. 

Palante,  Georges,  337  n. 


INDEX 


372 

Paley,  William,  267. 

Palladius,  358. 

Pantomime,  and  pantomimic  dancing, 
41,  42,  49,  56. 

Papuans,  the,  are  artistic,  351  n. 

Parachute,  constructed  by  Leonardo  da 
Vinci,  119. 

Paris,  dancing  in  choir  in,  44;  the  ballet 
at,  57. 

Parker,  Professor  E.  H.,  his  book  China: 
Past  and  Present,  23  n.\  his  view  of 
Chinese  vermin  and  dirt,  31,  32. 

Parks,  351. 

Parmelee,  Maurice,  his  Criminology, 
291  n. 

Parsons,  Professor,  142. 

Pascal,  Blaise,  and  the  Jesuits,  303,  304. 

Pater,  W.  H.,  the  music  of  his  style, 
164. 

Pattison,  Pringle,  his  definition  of  mysti¬ 
cism,  192  n. 

Paul,  Vincent  de,  his  moral  attitude,  279, 
280. 

Paulhan,  on  morality,  284. 

Pell,  E.  C.,  on  decreasing  birth-rate, 
294  n. 

Pepys,  Samuel,  the  accomplishment  of  his 
“Diary,”  176. 

Perera,  Galeotto,  his  picture  of  Chinese 
life,  19;  noticed  absence  of  beggars  in 
China,  31. 

Pericles,  289. 

Personality,  144. 

Pessimism,  and  optimism,  90-92. 

Petrie,  Dr.  W.  M.  Flinders,  his  attempt 
to  measure  civilisation  by  standard  of 

f  sculpture,  307,  308. 

Peyron,  traveller,  50. 

Phenomenalism,  Protagoras  the  father 
of,  3- 

Philosopher,  the  primitive,  usually  con¬ 
cluded  that  the  universe  was  a  work  of 
art,  1;  a  creative  artist,  72,  73,  85;  curi¬ 
osity  the  stimulus  of,  104,  105. 

Philosophy,  of  the  Chinese,  32;  solution 
of  the  conflicts  of,  in  art,  82,  83;  and 
art,  close  relationship  of,  83-85;  and 
poetry,  83,  85;  is  music,  179. 

Physics,  and  fiction,  95. 

Pictures,  revelation  of  beauty  in,  328, 
329;  should  be  looked  at  in  silence, 

329  n. 

Pindar,  calls  Hellas  “the  land  of  lovely 
dancing,”  55. 

Planck,  Max,  physicist,  136. 

Plato,  Protagoras  calumniated  by,  3; 
made  fun  of  Hippias,  4;  his  description 
of  a  good  education,  64;  a  creative 
artist,  73;  his  picture  of  Socrates,  75, 
78;  the  biographies  of,  76,  77;  his 
irony,  78,  83;  a  marvellous  artist,  82; 
a  supreme  artist  in  philosophy,  83;  a 
supreme  dramatist,  83;  his  “Ideas” 


and  the  “As-If  world,”  88;  the  myths, 
as  fictions,  hypotheses,  and  dogmas, 
99;  represents  the  acme  of  literary 
prose  speech,  155;  and  Plotinus,  222; 
on  the  Mysteries,  242;  asceticism, 
traced  in,  249  n.\  on  justice,  289;  his 
ideal  of  wise  moderation  addressed  to 
an  immoderate  people,  292;  Sophists 
caricatured  by,  302;  his  “guardians,” 
306;  the  ultrapuritanical  attitude  of, 
317,  318  n.;  and  Bovarism,  336;  on 
the  value  of  sight,  345  n.;  wished  to 
do  away  with  imaginative  literature, 
353  n.;  and  Jesus,  356. 

Pleasure,  a  human  creation,  24;  and  pain, 
united,  278. 

Pliny,  353  n. 

Plotinus,  222;  Greek  moral  spirit  re¬ 
flected  in,  249;  his  doctrine  of  Beauty, 
250,  251 ;  his  idea  that  the  moral  life  of 
the  soul  is  a  dance,  251,  252;  his  simile 
of  the  sculptor,  276  n.;  founder  of 
aesthetics  in  the  philosophic  sense,  329; 
recognised  three  aspects  of  the  Ab¬ 
solute,  330;  insisted  on  contemplation, 
330  331;  of  the  participating  con¬ 

templative  temperament,  332. 

Poet,  the  type  of  all  thinkers,  102; 
Landor  on,  154;  his  attitude  in  the 
presence  of  Nature,  168, 169;  the  great, 
does  not  describe  Nature  minutely, 
but  uses  his  knowledge  of,  170,  171. 

Poetry,  Chinese,  21, 22, 29,32;  and  music, 
and  acting,  36;  and  dancing,  56;  and 
philosophy,  83,  85;  and  science,  no 
sharp  boundary  between,  102, 128, 129; 
Landor  on,  154;  a  making,  312;  Aris¬ 
totle’s  view  of,  318;  does  not  exist  for 
morals,  318. 

Polka,  origin  of  the,  60. 

Polynesia,  dancing  in,  49. 

Polynesian  islanders,  255. 

Pontiff,  the  Bridge-Builder,  2. 

Pope,  Alexander,  influence  of  Shaftesbury 
on,  266. 

Porphyry,  167. 

Possessive  impulses,  306,  307,  341-43. 

Possessive  instinct,  restraints  placed 
upon,  338-40;  in  Gaultier  and  Russell, 
344;  excesses  of,  351. 

Pottery,  of  the  Chinese,  32,  33;  of  the 
Greeks  and  the  Minoan  predecessors  of 
the  Greeks,  32. 

Pound,  Miss,  on  the  origin  of  the  ballad, 
62  n. 

Pragmatism,  323. 

Pragmatists,  the,  93,  231,  232. 

Precious  stones,  attitude  of  the  poet 
toward,  169. 

Preposition,  the  post-habited,  146,  147, 
162. 

Prettiness,  and  beauty,  315  n. 

Priest,  cultivated  science  in  form  of 


INDEX 


magic,  19s;  and  doctor,  originally  one, 
197  n.,  203. 

Prodicus,  302;  the  Great  Moralist,  6  n. 

Progress,  143,  149;  on  meaning  of,  287. 

Prophecy,  204. 

Prophet,  meaning  of  the  word,  [203,  204. 

Propriety,  24-26. 

Protagoras,  significance  of  his  ideas,  in 
conception  of  life  as  an  art,  3,  4;  his 
interest  for  us  to-day,  3;  his  dictum 
“Man  is  the  measure  of  all  things,”  3, 
302;  concerned  to  regard  living  as  an 
art,  248. 

Proust,  Marcel,  172,  184;  his  art,  170  n., 
186,  187;  his  ^4  la  Recherche  du  Temps 
Perdu,  171,  187;  admiration  of,  for 
Ruskin,  316  n. 

Puberty,  questions  arising  at  time  of, 
105-07. 

Puritanism,  reaction  against,  represented 
by  Hutcheson,  271. 

Pygmalionism,  353  n. 

Pygmies,  the  dancing  of  the,  51. 

Pythagoras,  represents  the  beginning  of 
science,  73,  74;  fundamentally  an 
artist,  74,  75 ;  founded  religious  brother¬ 
hoods,  206,  207. 

Quatelet,  on  social  questions,  n8S. 

Quoting,  by  writers,  152. 

Rabbitism,  294. 

Rabelais,  Francois,  148,  165,  358. 

Race  mixture,  308. 

Raleigh,  Sir  Walter,  his  literary  style, 
*43-  . 

Ramedjenis,  the,  street  dancers,  52. 

Rank,  Dr.  Otto,  his  essay  on  the  artist, 
hi. 

Realism,  83. 

Realists,  70,  341  n. 

Reality,  a  flux  of  happening,  101. 

Reason,  helps  to  mould  morals,  255-59. 

Reid,  Thomas,  influenced  by  Hutcheson, 
275- 

Relativism,  Protagoras  the  father  of,  3. 

Religion,  as  the  desire  for  the  salvation  of 
the  soul,  8;  origin  of  dance  in,  38;  con¬ 
nection  of  dance  with,  among  primitive 
men,  39;  in  music,  179;  and  science, 
supposed  difference  between,  191-203; 
its  quintessential  core,  191;  control  of 
Nature  through  oneness  with  Nature, 
at  the  heart  of,  194;  relation  of,  to 
science  and  magic,  194-96;  the  man  of, 
studying  science,  202;  and  science,  the 
harmony  of,  as  revealed  in  human 
history,  203-08;  and  science,  the  har¬ 
mony  of,  as  supported  by  personal 
experience  of  Havelock  Ellis,  209-18; 
asceticism  has  nothing  to  do  with 
normal,  222;  and  science,  how  they 
came  to  be  considered  out  of  harmony, 


373 

226-35;  the  burden  of  the  traditions  of, 
227;  and  church,  not  the  same,  228  n.; 
the  instinct  of,  234;  and  science,  har¬ 
mony  of,  summary  of  considerations 
confirming,  235,  236;  is  not  science, 
238-40;  an  act,  243;  a  restraint  placed 
upon  the  possessive  instinct,  339,  340; 
to  be  replaced  by  Eesthetic  instinct,  340, 
341.  See  Mysticism. 

Religions,  in  every  case  originally  salta¬ 
tory,  40. 

Religious  dances,  ecstatic  and  panto¬ 
mimic,  41 ;  survivals  of,  42 ;  in  Christian¬ 
ity,  42-45- 

Renan,  J.  E.,  his  style,  161;  his  Life  of 
Jesus,  212;  on  truth,  301. 

“Resident  in  Peking,  A,”  author  of 
China  as  it  Really  Is,  21,  22. 

Revelation,  Book  of,  153. 

Revival,  the,  241,  243. 

Rhythm,  marks  all  the  physical  and 
spiritual  manifestations  of  life,  37;  in 
work,  61. 

Rickert,  H.,  his  twofold  division  of 
Reality,  325,  326. 

Ridgeway,  William,  his  theory  of  origin 
of  tragedy,  56. 

Roberts,  Morley,  ironical  over  certain 
“men  of  science,”  126  n. 

Robinson,  Dr.  Louis,  on  apes  and  danc¬ 
ing,  46;  on  the  influence  of  the  drum, 

63- 

Rodo,  his  conceptions  those  of  Shaftes¬ 
bury,  269. 

Roman  law,  98. 

Romans,  the  ancient,  dancing  and  war 
allied  among,  63,  64;  did  not  believe 
that  living  is  an  art,  252. 

Romantic  spirit,  the,  206. 

Romantics,  the,  149,  156. 

Rome,  ancient,  dancing  in,  49;  genius 
built  upon  basis  of  slavery  in,  292. 

Rops,  Felicien,  167. 

Ross,  Robert,  150. 

Rouen  Cathedral,  Salome  on  portal  of, 
49  n. 

Rousseau,  J.  J.,  Napoleon  before  grave 
of,  11 ;  felt  his  lapses,  79;  grace  of,  149; 
love  of  Nature  developed  through,  238; 
and  Shaftesbury,  268,  269;  decided 
against  civilisation,  298. 

Roussillon,  44. 

Rule,  rigid  subserviency  to,  mark  of 
decadence,  173;  much  lost  by  rigid 
adherence  to,  in  style,  175. 

Rules  for  Compositors  and  Readers,  on 
spelling,  Oxford  University  Press, 
174  n. 

Ruskin,  John,  316;  a  God-intoxicated 
man,  316  n. 

Russell,  Bertrand,  on  the  Chinese,  23;  on 
mathematics,  139,  140;  on  the  creative 
and  the  possessive  impulses,  305-07, 


INDEX 


374 

341,  342;  system  of,  compared  with 
Gaultier’s,  342,  343. 

Russia,  the  genius  of,  compared  with  the 
temper  of  the  population,  293. 

Russian  ballet,  the,  58-60. 

Rutherford,  Sir  Ernest,  on  the  atomic 
constitution,  97  n. 

St.  Augustine,  79,  202;  on  the  art  of 
living  well,  252. 

St.  Basil,  on  the  dancing  of  the  angels,  43. 

St.  Bonaventura,  said  to  have  been 
author  of  “Dieta  Salutis,”  43. 

St.  Denis,  Ruth,  60. 

St.  Theresa,  and  Darwin,  198,  199. 

Salome,  the  dance  of,  49. 

Salt,  intellectual  and  moral  suggestion  of 
the  word,  263,  263  n.,  264. 

Salt,  Mr.,  169. 

Salter,  W.  M.,  his  Nietzsche  the  Thinker, 
335  n. 

Samoa,  sacred  position  of  carpenter  in,  2. 

Sand,  George,  on  civilisation,  300. 

Santayana,  Professor  George,  on  union 
of  aesthetic  sense  with  artistic  instinct, 
350  n. 

Schelling,  F.  W.  J.  von,  90;  on  philosophy 
and  poetry,  83. 

Schiller,  Friedrich  von,  influence  on 
Vaihinger,  89;  and  the  aesthetic  con¬ 
ception  of  morals,  275. 

Schleiermacher,  Friedrich,  90. 

Schmidt,  Dr.  Raymund,  93  n. 

Schopenhauer,  Arthur,  330  n.;  his  influ¬ 
ence  on  Vaihinger,  90;  as  regards  his 
quotations,  152;  morals  based  on  sym¬ 
pathy,  according  to,  272;  on  the  use¬ 
lessness  of  art,  319;  on  the  man  of 
genius,  320;  on  sociological  function  of 
art,  323 ;  on  the  proper  way  of  looking 
at  pictures,  329  n.;  on  the  world  as  a 
spectacle,  334. 

Science,  spirit  of  modern,  in  Protagoras,  4; 
as  the  search  for  the  reason  of  things, 
8;  and  poetry,  no  sharp  boundary 
between,  102,  128,  129;  impulse  to, 
and  the  sexual  instinct,  112;  intuition 
and  invention  needed  by,  137;  and 
mysticism,  supposed  difference  be¬ 
tween,  191-203;  what  is  meant  by,  192; 
and  art,  no  distinction  between,  in 
classic  times,  68;  and  art,  distinction 
between,  in  modern  times,  68-70; 
definitions  of,  70,  71;  is  of  the  nature 
of  art,  71;  the  imaginative  application 
of,  72;  Pythagoras  represents  the  be¬ 
ginning  of,  74;  control  of  Nature 
through  oneness  with  Nature,  at  the 
heart  of,  194;  relation  of,  to  magic  and 
religion,  194-96;  and  pseudo-science, 
199-202;  and  mysticism,  the  harmony 
of,  as  revealed  in  human  history,  203- 
08;  and  mysticism,  the  harmony  of, 


as  supported'by  personal  experience  of 
Havelock  Ellis,  209-18;  and  mysticism, 
how  they  came  to  be  considered  out  of 
harmony,  226-35;  traditions  of,  228; 
the  instinct  of,  234;  and  mysticism, 
harmony  of,  summary  of  considerations 
confirming,  235,  236;  is  not  religion, 
238-40;  not  pursued  for  useful  ends, 
322;  for  science’s  sake,  347. 

Sciences,  and  arts,  68-70 .  biological  and  so¬ 
cial,  fiction  in,  99;  mathematical  impe¬ 
tus  given  to,  toward  end  of  seventeenth 
century,  180;  biological,  awakening  of, 
181;  mathematical,  renaissance  of,  181. 

Scientist,  the  true,  an  artist,  72,  73,  112, 
126;  curiosity  the  stimulus  of,  104, 
105;  the  false,  125,  126;  who  turns  to 
religion,  199-201. 

Scott,  W.  R.,  on  art  and  aesthetics,  326  n. 

Scottish  School,  the,  267. 

Sculpture,  painting,  and  the  arts  of 
design,  36;  civilisation  measured  by 
standard  of,  308. 

Seises,  the,  the  dance  of,  44  n. 

Selous,  Edmund,  36  n.  ? 

Semon,  Professor,  R.,  351  n. 

“Sense,”  Hutcheson’s  conception  of,  274. 

Seville,  cathedral  of,  dancing  in,  44. 

Sex,  instinct  of,  a  reaction  to  the  stimulus 
of  curiosity,  104;  early  questions  con¬ 
cerning,  105-07;  source  of  art  impulse, 
108-12;  and  the  scientific  interest,  112; 
not  absolutely  essential,  234. 

Sexual  imagery,  strain  of,  in  thought,  113. 

“Shadow,”  219 n. 

Shaftesbury,  Earl  of,  influence  on  Kant, 
254;  illustrated  unsystematic  method 
of  thinking,  259;  his  book,  260;  his 
theory  of  ^Esthetic  Intuitionism,  260; 
his  affinity  to  the  Greeks,  260;  his 
early  life,  261;  his  idea  of  goodness, 
262;  his  principles  expounded,  264-66; 
his  influence  on  later  writers  and 
thinkers,  266;  his  influence  on  our 
modern  morality,  266, 267;  the  greatest 
Greek  of  modern  times,  267,  271;  his 
service  to  the  modern  world,  267; 
measure  of  his  recognition  in  Scotland 
and  England,  267;  recognition  of, 
abroad,  268,  269;  made  no  clear  dis¬ 
tinction  between  creative  artistic 
impulse  and  critical  aesthetic  appre¬ 
ciation,  270;  realised  that  reason  can¬ 
not  affect  appetite,  270;  one  of  the 
founders  of  aesthetics,  271;  his  use  of 
the  term  “moral  sense,”  273,  274; 
temperamentally  a  Stoic,  279;  of  the 
aesthetic  contemplative  temperament, 
332,  333- 

Shakespeare,  William,  148;  his  style  com¬ 
pared  with  that  of  Bacon,  160;  affected 
by  the  intoxication  of  words,  167; 
stored  up  material  to  be  used  freely 


INDEX 


later,  170, 171 ;  the  spelling  of  his  name 
by  himself,  173;  surpasses  contem¬ 
poraries  in  flexibility  and  intimacy,  1 84 ; 
Tolstoy’s  opinion  of,  311;  on  Nature 
and  art,  312, 313;  his  figure  of  Prospero, 
331- 

Shamans,  the,  religious  dances  among, 
40, 41 ;  their  wills  brought  into  harmony 
with  the  essence  of  the  world,  193; 
double  attitude  of,  194. 

Sharp,  F.  C.,  on  Hutcheson,  327  n. 

Shelley,  P.  B.,  mysticism  in  poetry  of, 
237;  on  imagination  and  morality,  372. 

Sidgwick,  Henry,  255,  314. 

Singer,  Dr.  Charles,  his  definition  of 
science,  70,  71. 

Singing,  relation  to  music  and  dancing, 
62. 

Silberer,  Herbert,  on  magic  and  science, 
195- 

Simcox,  Edith,  her  description  of  con¬ 
version,  218  n. 

Skene,  on  dances  among  African  tribes, 
38. 

Slezakova,  Anna,  the  polka  extemporised 
by,  60. 

Smith,  Adam,  his  “economic  man,”  99; 

[,  morals  based  on  sympathy,  according 
to,  272;  influenced  by  Hutcheson,  275. 

Smith,  Arthur  H.,  his  book  Chinese 
Characteristics,  23  n. 

Social  capillarity,  298. 

Social  ladder,  298,  299. 

Social  statistics,  286-88. 

Socialists,  French,  inspired  by  Shaftes¬ 
bury,  269.  “ 

Socrates,  the  Platonic,  75,  78;  Grote’s 
chapter  on,  76;  the  real  and  the  legend¬ 
ary,  76,  79,  82;  three  elements  in  our 
composite  portrait  of,  77-79;  the  Pla¬ 
tonic,  and  the  Gospel  Jesus,  82,  83;  on 
philosophy  and  music,  179;  his  view  of 
the  moralist,  248. 

Solidarity,  socialistic,  among  the  Chinese, 
26,  27. 

Solmi,  Vincian  scholar,  114. 

Sophists,  the,  4,  302,  302  n. 

Sophocles,  danced  in  his  own  dramas,  56; 
beauty  and  moral  order  in,  247; 
Tolstoy’s  opinion  of,  31 1. 

Soul,  a  fiction,  100;  in  harmony  with 
itself,  219;  the  moral  life  of,  as  a  dance, 
251, 252. 

South  Sea  Islands,  dancing  in,  49. 

Space,  absolute,  a  fiction,  95. 

Spain,  dancing  in,  44,  50,  54. 

Speech,  the  best  literary  prose,  155;  in 
Greece,  155;  in  England,  155,  156;  the 
artist’s,  156;  a  tradition,  161. 

Spelling,  and  thinking,  127  n.;  has  little  to 
do  with  style,  173;  now  uniform  and 
uniformly  bad,  174,  175. 

Spencer,  Herbert,  on  science  and  art,  68; 


375 

on  use  of  science  in  form  of  magic,  195; 
the  universe  according  to,  215;  on  tht 
harmlessness  of  moral  teaching,  246  n.; 
on  diminishing  birth-rate,  294  n. 

Spengler,  Dr.  Oswald,  on  the  develop¬ 
ment  of  music,  135  nr,  argues  on  the 
identity  of  physics,  mathematics,  re¬ 
ligion,  and  great  art,  138;  his  theory 
of  culture  and  civilisation,  309,  310. 

Spinoza,  Baruch,  89;  has  moved  in  sphere 
where  impulses  of  religion  and  science 
spring  from  same  source,  207;  trans¬ 
forms  ethics  into  geometry,  281;  has 
been  called  a  God-intoxicated  man, 
316  nr,  his  “intellectual  love  of  God,” 
342. 

Spirit,  and  matter,  229,  230. 

Statistics,  uncertainty  of,  286;  for  meas¬ 
urement  of  civilisation,  286-88;  applied 
to  France  to  test  civilisation,  295-97. 

Steele,  Dr.  John,  on  the  Chinese  cere¬ 
monial,  29  n. 

Stephen,  Sir  Leslie,  on  poetry  and  philos¬ 
ophy,  85;  could  see  no  good  in 
Shaftesbury,  268. 

Stevenson,  R.  L.,  188. 

Stocks,  eradication  of  unfit,  by  Man, 
354;  recommended  by  Jesus,  355,  356. 

Stoics,  the,  207. 

Strauss,  D.  F.,  his  The  Old  Faith  and  the 
New,  214. 

Style,  literary,  of  to-day  and  of  our  fore¬ 
fathers’ time,  143;  the  achievement  of, 
155 ;  grace  seasoned  with  salt,  155;  ata¬ 
vism  in,  in  members  of  the  same  fam¬ 
ily,  158,  190;  atavism  in,  in  the  race, 
160,  190;  much  that  is  instinctive  in, 
163;  the  music  of,  163, 164;  vocabulary 
in,  164,  165;  the  effect  of  mere  words 
on,  165-67;  familiarity  with  author’s, 
necessary  to  understanding,  171,  172; 
spelling  has  little  to  do  with,  173;  much 
lost  by  slavish  adherence  to  rules  in, 
75;  must  have  clarity  and  beauty,  176-- 
78;  English  prose,  Cartesian  influence 
on,  180  nr,  personal  and  impersonal, 
182,  183;  progress  in,  lies  in  casting 
aside  accretions  and  exuberances,  183; 
founded  on  a  model,  the  negation  of 
style,  188;  the  task  of  breaking  the  old 
moulds  of,  188,  189;  summary  of  ele¬ 
ments  of,  190.  See  Writing. 

Suicide,  rate  of,  as  test  of  civilisation, 
295,  296. 

Swahili,  dancing  among,  38. 

Swedenborg,  Emanuel,  his  science  and 
his  mysticism,  208. 

Swedish  ballet,  the,  60. 

Sweet  ( suavis ),  referring  to  moral  quali¬ 
ties,  264. 

Sweetness,  and  goodness,  in  Shaftesbury’s 
philosophy,  262;  originally  the  same, 
263. 


INDEX 


376 

Swift,  Jonathan,  laments  “the  corrup¬ 
tion  of  our  style,”  142;  beauty  of  his 
style,  rests  on  truth  to  logic  of  his 
thought,  183;  utterance  of,  combining 
two  conceptions  of  life,  333. 

Swimming-belt,  constructed  by  Leonardo 
da  Vinci,  119. 

Swinburne,  C.  A.,  on  writing  poetry  to 
a  tune,  62;  his  Poems  and  Ballads, 
172;  his  Songs  before  Sunrise,  212. 

Sylvester,  J.  J.,  on  mathematics,  139. 

Symphony,  the  development  of  a  dance 
suite,  62. 

Syndicalism,  as  test  of  civilisation,  296, 
297. 

Taglioni,  Maria,  58. 

Tahiti,  dancing  at,  50. 

Tambourine,  the,  53. 

Tao,  the  word,  204. 

Taste,  the  gospel  of,  280. 

Telegraph,  the,  72  n. 

Telephone,  the,  72  n. 

Tell-el-Amarna,  28. 

Theology,  227. 

Therapeuts,  the  worship  of,  42. 

Thing-in-Itself,  the,  a  fiction,  101. 

Things,  are  fictions,  98. 

Thinking,  of  the  nature  of  art,  85,  86; 
and  existing,  on  two  different  planes, 
101;  the  special  art  and  object  of,  101; 
is  a  comparison,  102;  is  a  regulated 
error,  103;  abstract,  the  process  of  its 
birth,  108,  109. 

Thompson,  Silvanus,  on  Faraday,  132. 

Thomson,  James,  influence  of  Shaftes¬ 
bury  on,  266. 

Thomson,  Sir  Joseph,  on  matter  and 
weight,  230. 

Thoreau,  H.  D.,  on  morals,  282. 

Thought,  logic  of,  inescapable,  183. 

Tobacco,  consumption  of,  as  test  of  civil¬ 
isation,  295. 

Todas,  the,  of  India,  203  n. 

Toledo,  cathedral  of,  dancing  in,  44. 

Tolstoy,  Count  Leo,  his  opinions  on  art, 
311- 

Tonga,  sacred  position  of  carpenter  in,  2. 

Tooke,  Horne,  151  n. 

Townsend,  Rev.  Joseph,  on  the  fandan¬ 
go,  50. 

Tradition,  the  corporeal  embodiment  of 
heredity,  161 ;  and  instinct,  mould  mor¬ 
als,  254-59. 

Traditions,  religious,  227;  scientific,  228. 

Triangles,  53. 

Truth,  the  measuring-rod  of,  230-32. 

Tunisia,  Southern,  dancing  in,  49. 

T’ung,  the  story  of,  33. 

Turkish  dervishes,  dances  of,  41. 

Tuscans,  the,  56.  See  Etruscans. 

Tyndall,  John,  on  Faraday,  130-32. 

Tyrrells,  the,  the  handwriting  of,  157. 


Ugliness,  328. 

Ulysses,  representative  of  ideal  of  total¬ 
ity  of  existence,  6. 

United  States,  the  genius  of,  compared 
with  the  temper  of  the  population,  293. 

Universe,  conceived  as  work  of  art  by 
primitive  philosopher,  1;  according  to 
D.  F.  Strauss,  214;  according  to  Spen¬ 
cer,  215;  according  to  Hinton,  216; 
according  to  Sir  James  Frazer,  219  nr, 
according  to  Bertrand  Russell,  219  nr, 
conception  of,  a  personal  matter,  219 
nr,  the  so-called  materialistic,  229, 230; 
Bovarism  of,  337. 

Utilitarians,  the,  267,  268. 

Uvea,  15.  See  Loyalty  Islands. 

Vaihinger,  Hans,  his  Philosophie  des  Als 
Ob,  86;  English  influence  upon,  86,  87; 
allied  to  English  spirit,  87,  88;  his 
origin,  88;  his  training,  and  vocation, 
88-93;  influence  of  Schiller  on,  89; 
philosophers  who  influenced,  89,  90; 
his  pessimisms,  irrationalism,  and 
voluntarism,  90;  his  view  of  military 
power  of  Germany,  90,  91 ;  his  devour¬ 
ing  appetite  for  knowledge,  92;  reads 
F.  A.  Lange’s  History  of  Materialism, 
92, 93 ;  writes  his  book  at  about  twenty- 
five  years  of  age,  93 ;  his  book  published, 
94;  the  problem  he  set  out  to  prove,  94; 
his  doctrine  of  fiction,  94-102;  his 
doctrine  not  immune  from  criticism, 
102;  the  fortifying  influence  of  his 
philosophy,  102, 103;  influenced  Adler, 
337- 

Valencia,  cathedral  of,  dancing  in,  44. 

Valerius,  Maximus,  353  n. 

Van  Gogh,  mysticism  in  pictures  of,  237. 

Varnhagen,  Rahel,  66. 

Verbal  counters,  149,  150. 

Verlaine,  Paul,  the  significance  of  words 
to,  168. 

Vesalius,  120. 

Vasari,  Giorgio,  his  account  of  Leonardo 
da  Vinci,  115,  123. 

Vestris,  Gaetan,  and  the  ballet,  57. 

Vinci,  Leonardo  da,  man  of  science,  113, 
125;  as  a  painter,  113,  114,  117,  118; 
his  one  aim,  the  knowledge  and  mas¬ 
tery  of  Nature,  114,  117,  125;  an 
Overman,  115;  science  and  art  joined 
in,  1 1 5-1 7;  as  the  founder  of  profes¬ 
sional  engineering,  118, 119;  the  extent 
of  his  studies  and  inventions,  119,  120; 
a  supreme  master  of  language,  12 1 ;  his 
appearance,  121;  his  parentage,  121; 
his  youthful  accomplishments,  122; 
his  sexual  temperament,  122,  123;  the 
man,  woman,  and  child  in,  123,  124;  a 
figure  for  awe  rather  than  love,  124. 

Vinci,  Ser  Piero  da,  father  of  Leonardo  da 
Vinci,  12 1. 


INDEX 


Virtue,  and  beauty,  among  the  Greeks, 
247;  the  art  of  living  well,  252;  in 
Shaftesbury’s  system,  265,  266;  beauty 
of,  270  n. 

Virtues,  ethical  and  intellectual,  330. 

Visconti,  Galeazzo,  spectacular  pageants 
at  marriage  of,  57^ 

Vocabulary,  each  writer  creates  his  own, 
164,  165. 

Voltaire,  F.  M.  A.  de,  recognised  Shaftes¬ 
bury,  268;  on  the  foundations  of 
society,  289. 

Wagner,  Richard,  on  Beethoven’s  Sev¬ 
enth  Symphony,  62,  63. 

Wallas,  Professor  Graham,  on  Plato  and 
Dante,  73. 

War,  and  dancing,  allied,  63,  64. 

Wealth,  as  test  of  civilisation,  296,  297. 

Weight,  its  nature,  230. 

Weismann,  and  the  study  of  heredity, 
127. 

Wells,  H.  G.,  his  description  of  Napoleon, 
8-10,  12. 

Whitman,  Walt,  his  Leaves  of  Grass,  172; 
words  attributed  to  him  on  what  is 
right,  254. 

Woman,  the  question,  what  she  is  like, 
106. 


377 

Words,  have  a  rich  content  of  their  own, 
166;  the  intoxication  of,  167-69;  their 
arrangement  chiefly  studied  by  young 
writer,  172. 

Wordsworth,  William,  184;  influence  of 
Shaftesbury  on,  266. 

Work,  a  kind  of  dance,  61,  62. 

World,  becoming  impalpable  and  vision- 
ary,  337,  338.  See  Universe. 

Writers,  the  great,  have  observed  deco¬ 
rum  instinctively,  181,  182;  the  great, 
learn  out  of  themselves,  188,  189;  the 
great,  are  heroes  at  heart,  189. 

Writing,  personality  in,  144,  190;  a  com¬ 
mon  accomplishment  to-day,  144,  145 ; 
an  arduous  intellectual  task,  151, 153, 
190;  good  and  bad,  154;  the  achieve¬ 
ment  of  style  in,  155;  machine-made, 
156;  not  made  by  the  laws  of  gram¬ 
mar,  172,  173;  how  the  old  method 
gave  place  to  the  new,  179-81;  sum¬ 
mary  of  elements  of,  190.  See  Hand¬ 
writing,  Style. 

Wundt,  Wilhelm,  on  the  dance,  38,  39  n. 

/ 

Xavier,  Francis,  123,  237. 

Xenophon,  his  portrait  of  Socrates,  77. 

Zeno,  249  «. 


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